By: Dr. Kathleen Driscoll

In the past three decades ethical concerns in health care have mushroomed. Ethics raises questions about what is good and how best to achieve that good. Treatments that enable life to continue when the natural progression of illness would have resulted in an earlier, less technologically encumbered death raise questions about the nature of death and how treatment choices are made by patients and providers. Discussions of somatic cell and reproductive cell gene therapy raise even knottier questions about the nature of human life. The availability of sophisticated treatment measures to some and not others raises questions about the just distribution of health care as a societal good. Providers may find themselves torn between commitment to what they view as the good of their patient and commitment to societal good. In this the 21 st century, defining what is good for patients, providers, health care institutions, and society is not easy.

This Computer Assisted Instructional Program offers a series of lessons that help students in health care programs explore the ethical dimensions of providing health care in today's world. The first three lessons create a framework for examining more specific ethical dilemmas in the subsequent lessons. The first lesson consists of defining ethics as a branch of moral philosophy and examining how frequently used ethical theories and principles can be applied to ethical decision making in health care. The second lesson discusses moral values as the underpinning of ethical decision making that can be used as a template for the problems in the later lessons. In this third lesson the student has an opportunity to see how this template is applied to working through a sample ethical dilemma.

For remaining lessons, see the Table of Contents for the Ethics system.

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