Healthcare professionals must have a strong working knowledge of ethics and law to be competent and successful. A qualified professional knows how to provide safe, quality healthcare to a population of culturally diverse consumers. To address the needs of all patients, you can apply models such as shared decision making, where patients are encouraged to share their preferences and needs. The application of this model requires that healthcare professionals know how to apply ethical theories such as patient autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and fidelity when caring for patients. On a daily basis, healthcare professionals face ethical dilemmas involving patients and colleagues. Understanding how to effectively apply the code of ethics in your field, and various other codes of professional conduct, is an important skill required of all healthcare professionals. By applying ethical decision making, you positively impact the delivery of safe, quality healthcare. 

Under certain circumstances, healthcare professionals can be sued by patients for malpractice; it is more common for physicians to be sued when patients are injured or die as a result of their medical care. Healthcare professionals need a clear understanding of the elements of medical malpractice (standard of care, breach, causation, and damages) and how they are applied by a judge in a court of law. Healthcare professionals play a critical role due to the nature of their relationship with both patients and physicians. To remain competent and grow in the field, healthcare professionals are expected to understand how their professional responsibility includes a wide-ranging accountability to self, their profession, their patients, and the public. 

Your final case study for this course will require you to analyze a court decision in which a physician was found liable for medical malpractice. You will focus on facts pertaining to the medical standard of care, breach of care, and causation, and explain how they were applied to law. You will then use the facts of the case to identify an ethics issue and determine an ethical theory that would help provide a safe, quality healthcare experience for the patient. Next, you will apply a clinician–patient shared decision-making model to describe how the ethics issue could be resolved. You will also include a discussion about possible violations of the code of ethics in your given field. Lastly, you will augment or vary the facts of the case to create a hypothetical scenario that changes the outcome so that the physician is no longer liable for medical malpractice. 

Final Project I is divided into two milestones, which will be submitted at various points throughout the course to scaffold learning and ensure quality final submissions. These milestones will be submitted in Modules Three and Five. The final product will be submitted in Module Seven. 

In this assignment, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following course outcomes: 

 Analyze the impact of healthcare-related policy and legislature with regard to culturally diverse healthcare consumers and providers 

 Determine ethical theories and decision-making models appropriate for healthcare providers to use for providing a safe, quality healthcare experience for the patient  Analyze the role of professional regulation, the standard of care, and codes of ethics in determining healthcare providers’ wide-ranging accountability to self, their profession, their patients, and the public 

Prompt In this project, you will analyze a court case involving medical malpractice. Using your analysis of the case, you will address the facts pertaining to the medical standard of care, breach of care, and causation. Further, you will use the facts from the original case to identify an ethics issue, determine an ethical theory that would help provide a safe and quality healthcare experience for the patient, apply a clinician–patient shared decision-making model, and augment or vary the facts of the case to change the outcome. 

Specifically, your case study must address the following critical elements: 

I. Introduction: A. Summarize the selected case, including information on the stakeholders involved, the problem, and the time period the incident occurred. 

II. Medical Malpractice Component: In this section, you will evaluate the case to address the legal components, the malpractice policies similar to this case, and the standard of care given to the patient and how it was breached. Then, you will draw connections to how this malpractice case impacted stakeholders and healthcare consumers outside of the case. A. Explain the key legal components of the case, including the nature of the issue and the rules that applied. B. Determine relevant malpractice policies in place for addressing the issues within the case. C. Analyze the malpractice case for the standard of care provided to the victim. Be sure to apply what the law states about standard of care to support whether or not it was breached in the case. D. Analyze how the malpractice case would impact healthcare consumers from different cultural backgrounds. For example, would this case have a similar impact on a person from a culture different from the one in the case? How could this incident change the views of these healthcare consumers toward the healthcare system? E. Assess the malpractice case for accountability based on its severity. To what extent was the healthcare provider held accountable? 

III. Ethical Component: In this section, you will evaluate the case to identify the specific ethical issues and determine ethical theories and shared decisionmaking models that would help resolve the issue and provide a safe, quality healthcare experience. Then, you will propose and defend ethical guidelines for healthcare providers to follow in order to avoid future incidents. A. Describe the ethical issues that led to the malpractice case and explain why the issues are credited with causing the incident. Support your response with research and relevant examples from the case. B. Describe an ethical theory that would help resolve the issue and provide a safe, quality healthcare experience for the patient. Support your response with research and relevant examples from the case. C. Select a physician–patient shared decision-making model and explain how it would provide a safe, quality healthcare experience for the patient D. Propose ethical guidelines that would have helped prevent the incident and would help the organization prevent future incidents. E. Defend how your proposed ethical guidelines will hold healthcare providers accountable to themselves, their profession, their patients, and the public. 

II. Recommendations: In this section, you will utilize the knowledge you gained from your malpractice and ethical analyses to recommend and defend strategies that would help improve medical practices and avoid future liability. A. Recommend preventative strategies the healthcare provider could implement to avoid liability in the future. B. Defend how your recommended preventative strategies would assist the healthcare provider in avoiding liability and provide a safe, quality healthcare experience for the patient.

Guidelines for Submission: Your case study should be a 4- to 6-page Microsoft Word document with 12-point Times New Roman font and one-inch margins. All citations and references should be formatted according to the most recent APA guidelines.

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