Rights vs. Responsibilities: Professional Standards and Provider Refusals
Summary
What has often been absent from this debate over providers’ rights has been any serious discussion about providers’ responsibilities—to their patients, colleagues, employers and the public. Some of these obligations are encoded in law; perhaps more importantly, they are enshrined in professional codes of ethics that define what it means to be a health care professional and supplemented by individual professional associations’ policy statements on various issues. |