Bioethics in Healthcare Law - What is it?

Bioethics asks questions such as:

• what is the right thing to do?
• what is worthwhile?
• what are our obligations to one another?
• who is responsible, to whom and for what?
• what is the fitting reply to this dilemma, given the context?
• on what moral grounds are such claims made?

The discipline deals with the ethical implications of biological research and applications especially in medicine. Bioethics includes the study of what is right and wrong in new discoveries and techniques in biology, such as genetic engineering and the transplantation of organs. Bioethics looks at what should be done when dealing with or taking care of people and other living creatures. Bioethics looks at questions about values and what matters in medicine, biological research, care of people who cannot speak up for themselves and similar topics. 

Bioethics is also concerned with questions about basic human values such as the rights to life and health, and the rightness or wrongness of certain developments in healthcare institutions, life technology, medicine, the health professions and about society's responsibility for the life and health of its members. Decisions involving bio-ethical issues are made every day in diverse situations such as the relationship between patients and their physicians, the treatment of human subjects in biomedical experimentation, allocation of scarce medical resources, complex questions that surround the beginning and the end of a human life and the conduct of clinical medicine and life sciences research.

There are four principles which form the framework for moral reasoning. They are:

• Non-maleficence - This states that one should avoid causing harm. The healthcare professional should not harm the patient. All treatment involves some harm no doubt, but the harm should not be disproportionate to the benefits of treatment.
• Justice - The benefits and risks should be fairly distributed. The notion is that, patients in similar positions should be treated in a similar manner. 
• Beneficence - One should take positive steps to help others. You consider the balance of the benefit of going on with the treatment against the risks and costs; the healthcare professional should act in a way that benefits the patient. 
• Autonomy - One should respect the right of individuals to make their own decisions by respecting the decision making capacities of autonomous persons; enabling individuals to make reasoned informed choices.