Ethics in Health Care

Although health care is primarily delivered to individual patients, health care ethics examines issues that relate to many stakeholders, including patients (first and foremost), families, providers, institutions, thirdparty payers, and society. Ethics in health care can richly overlap with other areas of ethical enquiry such as organizational and business ethics, as well as research and public health ethics. Health care ethics is a young and loosely defined interdisciplinary field with a diverse community of scholars; however, it has been recognized as a field of study within the university, and it has a shared vocabulary, specialized journals, research funding, and an identifiable body of topics of concern. Scholars in the field of health care ethics seek consensus where possible, and when consensus is not possible, the ...