Are Workarounds Ethical in Health Care Systems

January 12, 2016

(Eurekalert) – “There is more than one ‘clean hands’ problem in health care work,” writes Nancy Berlinger, a Hastings Center research scholar and a specialist in health care ethics, at the opening of her new book, Are Workarounds Ethical? Managing Moral Problems in Health Care Systems, published by Oxford University Press. The book examines the everyday ethical uncertainties that doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals face in caring for patients amid organizational resource allocation pressures, and the unofficial, sometimes problematic ways that they respond, including trying to wash their hands, symbolically, of situations seen as “legally risky, morally dodgy, or emotionally unclean.”