b. Health Care Providers Held Accountable for Patient's Rights. To comply
fully with the ethical requirements of your profession, you must be aware of a patient's
rights. This is true because the patient's bill of rights complements the code, filling in
the gaps and making concrete what is left unsaid and, thus, open to interpretation in the
code. Every hospital has its own version of a patient's bill of rights, outlining more or
less, the same rights (with some variation depending on the hospital). These are
posted, and a copy is given to each patient upon admission. Since patients are well
aware of their rights, you must be familiar with them as well.
c. Specific Tenets of the Patient's Bill of Rights.
(1) Prompt care in an emergency (principles five). Consider principle five of
the patient's bill of rights. A patient cannot be turned away by a hospital in an
emergency, e.g., for lack of insurance. If a patient suffers injuries or death resulting
from a lack of prompt care, the individual (or family) can sue for damages. "The Case of
Rod Miller" below, illustrates how health care can fall short of the ideals embodied in the
professional code of ethics and the patient's bill of rights.
THE CASE OF ROD MILLER
Rod Miller cut his foot on the rocky jelly at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, during the
summer of 1987. He expected that the nearby emergency room doctors would quickly
take care of him. But the orthopedic surgeon, nothing Rod's "demeanor" and the male
friend who accompanied him to the hospital, refused to perform the necessary surgery
unless Rod first had an AIDS test. So Rod had to take a helicopter to George
Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he underwent surgery to
repair a severed tendon.
The delay resulted in permanent damage to his foot, and so his attorney filed a
complaint with the civil rights office of the US Department of Health and Human
Services. According to the CDC, as of this writing 18 health care workers in the US and
abroad have been infected with the AIDS virus through on-the-job exposure, a small
number but still enough to make some doctors concerned about their risks.40
(2) Procedures and risks explained in layman's terms: patient's consent
obtained (principle 6). If a radiographer has to inject a patient with a contrast agent for
a special study for kidney pain, he or she must first explain that the contrast agent can
be toxic in some cases, causing an allergic reaction, shock, and possibly death. He or
she must also explain why the contrast agent is necessary in order to obtain the
required study. Obtaining an explanation from the health care provider about intended
procedures is a legal right in the US and most Western European nations. But in
England, this right was recently denied by the House of Lords, much to the shock of
MD0066
1-18