Ethical issues are very difficult as individual culture and beliefs may constitute differences in what is considered unethical. I find that in my work, an ethical and or moral issue is especially hard because the issues I face often surround physician practice. A profession of highly educated, knowledgeable, and maybe even some egotistic personalities
A recent situation in our practice raised some ethical dilemmas among those of us in leadership positions. As background, our physician practice is an independent private practice in the field of Radiology, and we contract with several hospitals for to provide the professional interpretation and procedures within Radiology.
In March of this year a young person came into one of our hospitals for an elective surgical procedure. The surgery was performed by a neuro surgeon employed by the hospital. A serious complication occurred in which the surgeon clipped an artery while performing the surgery, and presumably did not notice that he did and closed. Within a few hours, the 25 year old girls health and condition deteriorated drastically. At this point, this patient became our responsibility. She had a CT scan which showed the problem and one of our interventional radiologist needed to get involved to place a stent to stop the bleeding. The young woman’s condition was clearly very bad when she came to us, the error made by the neuro surgeon was significant and was definitely the root cause of the
