Legal and Ethical Issues in Healthcare Management 2

Ethical and Legal Concerns in Healthcare Management
The submissions in the peer text are absolutely correct. The text uses credible evidence to explore legal and ethical issues necessary in deciding if a patient is mentally competent to make personal medical decisions. Appelbaum (2007) notes that law and ethics require physicians to seek validly informed consent of their patients prior to treatment. Physicians have to disclose all the necessary information to a patient with competency and the ability to make voluntary treatment decisions.
Consequently, to know whether a patient has a legally competent ability to make their own treatment choices, it is imperative to assess their mental capacity (Buchanan, 2004). The four primary elements to note in the capacity evaluation include the ability to communicate clearly, the ability to appreciate, the ability to understand, and the capacity to reason appropriately (Dastidar & Odden, 2017).

Patients with the ability to communicate their decisions clearly, comprehend their conditions, appreciate the outcome of their decisions, and understand the potential risks and benefits involved in the particular decisions, are legally competent to decide appropriately. However, given the precarious nature of some patients’ choices, ethics require healthcare workers to act with a high level of performance and accuracy concerning the appropriate criteria (Buchanan, 2004).
Healthcare workers occasionally encounter circumstances in which a patient’s mental capacity relative to decision-making is questionable.

In such a case, a healthcare worker is allowed to make an independent consultation with key persons in the patient’s life (Weyrauch, 1999). That is the case in which geriatrics, ethics, and psychiatry consults can work awesomely. So, the patient’s autonomy is balances against best interests. However, healthcare workers may require bigger room for error, especially, when outcomes are severe, denotes a change to medical practice and is the confirmation that physicians offer in court.

References
Buchanan, A. (2004). Mental capacity, legal competence, and consent to treatment. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 97(9), 415-420
Appelbaum, P. S. (2007). Assessment of patients’ competence to consent to treatment. New England Journal of Medicine, 357(18), 1834-1840.
Weyrauch, S. (1999). Decision making for incompetent patients: Who decides and by what standards. Tulsa LJ, 35, 765.
Dastidar, J. G., & Odden, A. (2017, January 26). How Do I Determine if My Patient has Decision-Making Capacity? Retrieved January 15, 2018, from https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/124731/how-do-i-determine-if-my-patient-has-decision-making-capacity