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Physicians' Duty of Compassion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

Charles J. Dougherty  and
Ruth Purtilo
Charles J. Dougherty
Affiliation:
Director of the Center for Health Policy and Ethics, Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska.
Ruth Purtilo
Affiliation:
Professor of Clinical Ethics, Center for Health Policy and Ethics, Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska.
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Extract

This is a time of change in American healthcare. Market forces are restructuring local delivery systems around competing managed care networks. Many leading proposals for healthcare reform intend a reshaping of the national healthcare marketplace itself. Periods of change create an opportunity to reassess traditional values and practices. Such reassessments can be used to help insure that current innovations and proposed reforms preserve and strengthen the best in the traditions of medicine. A legitimate focus of concern in the medical and medical ethics community has been the effect of these delivery system changes on the physician-patient relationship. For example, will the future American healthcare system support and encourage compassion by physicians? Suppose it does not. Would something of significant moral value have been lost? More pointedly, would a system that undervalued or frustrated physician compassion be incompatible with the moral obligations of physicians? In order to address these questions, we examine the meaning of compassion and the role it should play in the physician-patient relationship. We argue that compassion is a duty of all physicians. Because this is so, we believe that changes in the healthcare system must be judged, in part, by how well they protect and encourage compassionate conduct by physicians.

Type
Special Section: Compassion: What Does It Really Mean?
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , Fall 1995 , pp. 426 - 433
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

Notes

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