Research Paper on Right to Access Medical Care: Strategies for Healthcare Organizations

Introduction

Every human being has a fundamental right to appropriate medical attention and healthcare-related services. Therefore, healthcare organizations have to ensure that they are in a position to provide for proper patient care servicing by availing adequate medical facilities and professional personnel. Patients have different medical needs; thus, the organizations have to develop strategies and policies that will gather for these varying needs without a breach of both ethical and legal rights. Patch Adam's movie presents an illustration of a story revolving around a health practitioner encountering legal and ethical constraints as a result of either his interaction with his institution or hi professional practice. This essay will, therefore, be seeking to illustrate various ethical and legal issues that the different healthcare-related institutions/organizations in the movie are facing.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Patch Adams contemplated suicide, thus, he got his admission to a mental/psychiatric hospital to undergo his process of healing. At the institution, he noted that the form of illness or the bed number was the main identities to the patients admitted. From this alone, this form of identification is unethical since the human beings (patients in this case) are being equated to either disease carrier or occupants of the bed. this identification mechanism is relatively undermining the patients but denying them human-related treatments deserved. This is a show of disrespect as the patients' recognition goes by their form of illness or bed numbers they occupy (Adams & Mylander, 1998).

His recovery in the psychiatric asylum was facilitated via making contact with his fellow patients, and not via his doctor. After leaving the mental hospital, he joined a medical school, two years later. He had a mission of fronting a new look in the methods of treatment in the health care system. As part of his medications, he considered and believed that humour was the best means of treating the soul. However, his dean at the medical school had a contradicting idea. The dean was instilling a culture to the students, where the doctors had to keep sticking to their being as doctors and to offer treatments to the patients according to what they were admitted for. This shows that the institution advocated for zero attachments to the patients. Looking at his policy, it not ethical to breed doctors lacking operational humanity. Further, the policy suggests that the patients hospitalized aren't humans and only needs treatments for their illnesses, to sum up their interaction basis. The students at the institution are left with two choices; keep abiding by thus unethical policy or get expelled just like the case for Adams.

After his reinstation, he had to convince some of his classmates to join him and start a clinic that uses humour while treating their patients; as alternative medicinal care based on love (Miles, 2019). He proceeded to make invitations to patients, where they used humour while attempting to treat them, as he had promised. This treatment process, however, is unethical since treating a disease requires well-informed, all-round and complete treatments; the fact that the application of humour alone can't provide. It was also wrong for him and his colleagues to run an unlicensed and illegally approved medical institution. Before running the medical clinic, they were required to obtain legal approvals. Additionally, the fact that they weren't qualified and authorized medical professionals (doctors) had them being unethical when they resorted to running a medical clinic.

With this story, we can conclude that healthcare organizations are running on both grounds of illegality and unethicality. The court released Adams. However, it doesn't imply that his actions were legal, so to the fact that his graduation doesn't drag the institution to be part of his unethical and illegal activities.

References

Adams, P., & Mylander, M. (1998). Gesundheit!: Bringing good health to you, the medical system, and society through physician service, complementary therapies, humour, and joy. Rochester, Vt: Healing Arts Press.

Miles, P. (2019). ROCK OF STRENGTH. Retrieved 15 October 2019, from http://petermiless.blogspot.com/2006/04/patch-adams-summary-and-reflection.html