Do you think all healthcare professionals should be required to obtain a license of some kind?
Licensing among the healthcare professionals has been an issue of concern in the Medicare industry in the world. The licensing of the healthcare professionals is one way of identifying them and their role in the healthcare industry. The qualities and skills of qualified healthcare personnel are justified by the licenses they have acquired in their respective fields in the healthcare docket. Various countries in the world have made efforts towards licensing their healthcare personnel to reduce the cases of unethical practices such as surgery done by a medical practitioner who is not qualified to do so. That may threaten the lives and wellbeing of the patients (Pagano et al., 2017).
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An example of a country in the globe with strict rules regarding the licensing of the Medicare staff is the US. The country does not have a uniform licensing procedure at the national level. Instead, each of the fifty states in the country has different rules regarding licensing and accreditation of the healthcare professionals. The US has also come up with a body, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH). NCCIH comes up with the roles of the medical practitioners in improving the healthcare standards in the country. That has been one of the most substantial factors necessitating the regulation of healthcare professionals (National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, 2018).
All the healthcare professionals should be required to obtain the license. Primarily, the US is one of the countries with the strictest rules pertaining the licensure of the medical practitioners to maintain their high-quality standards (Rampell, 2013). Therefore, the licensing and accreditation of such practitioners are necessary. Critics to the licensure of all the professionals in the medical industry in America have consistently stated that the new law is restrictive due to the discouragement of the prospective doctors in the country, mainly from the other nations of the world (Rampell, 2013). Nevertheless, it is worth for the US to license all the professionals in the medical sector to revolutionize the state of health in the country.
How is the public protected from breaches of confidentiality by an unlicensed person?
Confidentiality is one of the components of the code of ethics for the medical practitioners in the US, as well as, in the other countries across the world (Beauchamp, 2016). A breach of confidentiality may involve the revelation of the hidden information about a particular patient. Matters concerning violation of secrecy in the healthcare industry have consequences for both the patients and the professionals. The patients lose the information they may not have wanted to share with the unwanted parties leading to their subsequent stigmatization, neglect, and loss of the sense of belonging to their families, and even the larger society. Evidently, the breach of confidentiality, in the case, of the employees would lead to their dismissal from work (Tarzian, Wocial & ASBH Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs Committee, 2015).
The public has to be protected from breaches of confidentiality and in this case, where unlicensed medical personnel are involved. One of the approaches to reducing the violations of privacy is the determination of what to document. The documentation of the clinical data will sort private data from standard data. In the long run, the public will be protected from the breach of their privacy. Also, the determination of the licensed personnel to document the clinical data for storage is possible (Shokri & Shmatikov, 2015). Recently, the electronic health records (EHR) have come up as a solution to the breach of confidentiality. The EHR approach has reduced the public disclosure of health information that is private by an unlicensed person since they do not have access to the systems (Dinev et al. 2016).
Bodies in the US, such as the American Medical Association (AMA) have made efforts in preserving the code of ethics among the professionals in the pharmaceutical sector of the US. The AMA has devised a code of ethics to forbid the disclosure of information concerning the patients in any medical procedures. That has contributed to the avoidance of the breach of confidentiality by the unlicensed medical personnel (Berg, 2011).
References
Beauchamp, T. L. (2016). Principlism in Bioethics. In Bioethical Decision Making and
Argumentation (pp. 1-16). Springer, Cham.
Berg, J. W. (2011, August 17). Patient confidentiality: privacy and public health . Retrieved from http://www.thedoctorwillseeyounow.com/content/bioethics/art3401.html
Dinev, T., Albano, V., Xu, H., D’Atri, A., & Hart, P. (2016). Individuals’ attitudes towards
Electronic health records: A privacy calculus perspective. In Advances in healthcare informatics and analytics (pp. 19-50). Springer, Cham.
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. (2018, May 14). Credentialing, licensing, and education . Retrieved from https://nccih.nih.gov/health/decisions/credentialing.htm
Pagano, M. B., Wehrli, G., Cloutier, D., Galvin Karr, E., Lopez-Plaza, I., Schwartz, J., … Zantek, N. D. (2017). Apheresis Medicine education in the United States of America: State of the discipline. Transfusion and Apheresis Science , 56 (1), 1-5.
Rampell, C. (2013, August 11). Path to United States practice is long slog to foreign doctors. The New York Times . Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/business/economy/long-slog-for-foreign-doctors-to-practice-in-us.html
Shokri, R., & Shmatikov, V. (2015, October). Privacy-preserving deep learning. In Proceedings
Of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security (pp. 1310-1321). ACM.
Tarzian, A. J., Wocial, L. D., & ASBH Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs Committee. (2015).
A code of ethics for health care ethics consultants: Journey to the present and implications for the field. The American Journal of Bioethics , 15 (5), 38-51.
