Theme C Flashcards
Describe the professional attitude expected of medical staff and students?
- Make care of your patient your first concern.
- Protect and promote the health of your patients and the public.
- Provide a good standard of practice and care and keep up to date.
- Treat patients as individuals and respect their dignity.
- Work in partnership with patients.
- Be honest and open and act with integrity.
- Maintain confidentiality.
Definition of medical professionalism
• Set of values, behaviours and relationships that underpins the trust that the public has in doctors
Describe the regulatory role of the GMC?
• To protect, promote and maintain the health and safety of the public by ensuring proper standards in the practice of medicine.
Outline the role of medical schools and the GMC in ensuring students and doctors fitness to practice?
- GMC sets its guidance for what medical graduates need to accomplish in Tomorrow’s Doctors.
- This is taught by the medical schools.
- This is examined formally in various exams taken throughout the course, reflective essays, learning to give feedback and self-reflection, attendance and punctuality, plagiarism.
Benefits of good and consequences of bad communication?
• More accurate diagnosis
• More accurate data gathering
• Increased adherence with treatment regime
• More effective patient-doctor relationship
• Increased patient-doctor satisfaction
Benefits of good communication
• More accurate diagnosis
• More accurate data gathering
• Increased adherence with treatment regime
• More effective patient-doctor relationship
• Increased patient-doctor satisfaction
Consequences of poor communication • Inaccurate diagnosis • Less recognition of ICE • Non-adherence to treatment • Decreased satisfaction with doctor • More complaints
Can communication skills be taught? How?
- Skilled training leads to improvement in communication
- Self reflection
- Feedback should be specific, descriptive, and non-judgemental
Why is Calgary-Cambridge important?
- Every patient has their own problem and explains it within their own framework
- Understanding the CC model can help you treat them better and you can communicate with them from within their own framework
What models explain difference in people?
- Biomedical explanations of difference rely on biology
- Social models explain difference by social interactions
- Faith system
- Epigenetics (combines biological and social)
What makes science social?
- Decisions about research funding
- Pharmaceutical industry - profits
- Ethical issues
- Nature of scientific work - communication
What is eugenics?
- Improving a population by controlled breeding
* Encourages good genetics, discourages bad genetics
What is positive and negative eugenics?
POS= Encourages good genetics
NEG = Discourages bad genetics
Issues with eugenics?
- Thinking about the future based on genetics
- Designer babies
- Genetic screening - health insurance, employment, and civil liberties
- Many conditions are polygenic
What is patient centred care?
• Care that is responsive to the wants, needs, and preferences of the patient
6 criteria of patient centred care?
- Shared decision making
- Understanding of the patient’s needs, wants and preferences
- Enhances prevention and health promotion(early detection and complication prevention)
- Enhances the doctor-patient relationship(caring, feelings, trust and power)
- Realistic(resource and time based)
What is the sick role?
• TheSickRoledefines the obligations and privileges of the doctor-patient relationship.
What is the patient expected to do in the sick role?
• Want to get better
• Seek medical advice
• Shed some normal activities
Regarded as being in need of care and unable to get better on their own
What must the doctor do to uphold the sick role?
- Apply a high degree of skill and knowledge
- Act for welfare of patient (patients best interest), not self interest
- Be non-judgemental and emotionally detached
- Be guided by rules of professional practice
What right does the doctor have? (as part of the sick role)
- Right to examine patients
- Granted autonomy in professional practice
- Occupies position of authority in regard to the patient
Criticisms of the sick role?
- Symptom iceberg - Patients do not necessarily act on symptoms and go see the doctor
- Chronic illness and MUS - If cause unknown, patients can’t enter sick role due to uncertainty
- People try to label themselves as sick
- Conflict between best interests for the patient and cost to society in allocation of resources
• tension/strain on doctor to be non-judgemental and ignore their own beliefs
What is evidence?
• Body of facts/information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid
What 4 sources are used when making a clinical decision?
- Patient preferences
- Available resources
- Research evidence
- Clinical expertise
Why is evidence-based decision making important?
- Deals with uncertainty
- Medical knowledge is incomplete/shifting
- Patients will receive most appropriate treatment
- Constant need for innovation and improvement
- Improving efficiency of healthcare services
- Reduces practice variation
Give 4 ways in which EBDM may be implemented?
- Evidence based clinical guidelines
- Summaries of evidence provided to practitioners
- Access to reviews of research evidence
- Practitioners evaluating research for themselves
What is economics?
• Economics is about how people allocate scarce resources amongst competing activities
Define opportunity cost?
The cost of passing up the next best choice when making a decision
Give 3 aspects of opportunity cost decisions?
- Time is an important cost - spending time on one person denies another
- Overspending your budget cuts another elsewhere
- Good medical practice means you must be aware of the cost of the care you deliver to patients, be aware of the treatments you give to ensure they work
What are the sources of NHS funding?
- Tax finance
* Some user charges e.g. prescriptions
How is the NHS organised?
- 210 CCGs - Buyers
* Public hospitals and GPs - Sellers
What is flat of the curve medicine?
The phenomenon where health care consumption (costs) continues to rise while health outcomes (usually defined by life expectancy), remain the same
Criteria for choosing the best treatment
Must be cost effective and clinically effective
What are meta-ethics?
• Study of moral concepts, eg right and wrong
What is normative ethics (moral theory)?
• Study of the means of deciding what is right and wrong
Seeks to tell us how we can find out what things have what moral properties, to provide a framework for ethics
What is applied ethics?
It seeks to apply normative ethical theories to specific issues, telling what it is right and wrong for us to do- APPLICATION OF MORAL THEORY
What are the 3 main types of moral theory?
• Consequentialism - Moral based on the consequence of the action (Whether an act is right or wrong depends only on the results of that act.
The more good consequences an act produces, the better or more right that act)
- Deontoloty (duty based) - Moral based on actions adherence to the rules (focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions themselves)
- Virtue ethics - Right act is one a virtuous person would do (emphasizes an individual’s character as the key element of morality)
What are the 4 ethical principles?
- Autonomy - Respect the patient as an individual to make choices
- Non-maleficence - Not permitted to harm patients
- Beneficence - Act in a way that positively benefits patient (act in patients best interests)
- Justice - Treat people fairly and equitably
What are the 2 agenda’s and what’s the difference between them
- Disease - What is wrong with the body (physically)
* Illness - Look at the way that the patient experiences the disease
Why should you treat both the disease and the illness (2 agendas)
- Disease - Means you treat the correct condition, improves biomedical health
- Illness - Can discover how illness is impacting patients life, patient more satisfied, enhances doctor-patient relationship
What is autonomy?
- Fully informing patients with capacity to allow them to make their own decisions
- Respecting wishes regarding patients treatment
What ethical principles should you think about when assessing patients best interests?
- Beneficence - Act to positively benefit patient
* Non-maleficence - Act in a way as not to harm the patient
What potential difficulties that might occur when assessing best interest?
- Difficulties in predicting future outcome
- Conflict between benefits of treatment and patients own views
- Conflict between patient and doctor view of best interest
- Emotional attachment may distort doctors views
- Patient may be unable to communicate relevant information
What is paternalism?
• The intentional overriding of a persons known preferences or actions by another person (this can be by coercion or misinformation).
What is coercion?
• Persuading patient to do something by force of threats (eg forcing to eat)
What is misinformation?
• Lying to save from distress
What is the Bolam test? (negligence)
- Test of negligence, determines standard of care
- A doctor isn’t guilty of negligence if he has acted in accordance with a practice accepted by a responsible body of doctors.
What is the Bolitho amendment? (negligence)
BOLITHO - you cannot defend a case on the basis of a current practice that is not reasonable or logical
ie doctor’s behaviour should have been logical
Where can you look at disease distribution?
Globally, regionally, locally
Why do we need to study populations?
- To find out about risk (diseases, drugs, etc)
* Need to use evidence of what has previously happened to a population to work out how drugs act etc
What is epidemiology?
• Study of incidence, distribution and control of diseases in populations
What are the 3 types of epidemiology?
- Descriptive - Tell us how things are distributed
- Analytical - How we can exploit those distributions to ask questions
- Experimental - Change the distributions ourselves to see what happens
What is incidence?
New cases of disease within a period / Number initially free of disease
What is prevalence
Number of people with a disease at a particular point in time / Total population
How can epidemiology be useful in smoking research?
- Identify cause of disease
- Guides preventative action - Identifies targets for intervention
- Surveillance of populations and smoking can measure effects of intervention
What is illness behaviour?
• The way in which symptoms may be differently perceived, evaluated and acted upon by different kinds of persons
What is the symptom iceberg?
• Patients only report 5-15% of symptoms
The symptom iceberg describes the phenomenon that most symptoms are managed in the community without people seeking professional health care.
Only 10% of symptoms make patients see the doctor. The rest is undertaken by lay people and the community.
What is the lay referral system?
• People talk to other people (lay people) before seeking help
Friends, relatives, pharmacist
What demographic/social factors influence help seeking and illness behaviour?
- Gender
- Age
- Social class
- Race
- Culture
What are Zolas triggers to help seeking behaviour?
- Interference with work or physical activity
- Interference with social relations
- Interpersonal crisis e.g. death in family
- Putting a time limit on symptoms
- Sanctioning - relative/friends tell them to seek help
What influences health seeking behaviour?
- Perception and evaluation of symptoms
- Perceived risk
- Previous experience
- Psychological factors - Fear of what it might be
- Denial
- Concern about using NHS resources
What barriers are there to help seeking?
- Provision and availability of services
- Car ownership, transport cost, availability
- Disruption to work
- Attitudes of staff - Previous bad experience
- Inverse care law - Better off areas get better health provision that poorer areas
- Geographical distance
- Time, effort
- Long waiting times
What is health promotion?
• The process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health
What are WHOs 5 aspects of health promotion?
- H - Healthy public policy
- A - Action in the community
- R - Re-orientating health services
- P - Personal skills
- S - Supportive environment
What are the four different approaches to health promotion
- Medical - Focuses on disease and prevention
- Behavioural - Focuses on attitudes and lifestyles
- Client-centred - Focuses on empowering individuals
- Societal - Focuses on political and social action
- Educational - focus on teaching and education
What is primary/secondary/tertiary health prevention?
Primary prevention: Prevent onset of disease (e.g. screening risk factors, health protection and health education)
Secondary prevention: Catching the disease early (e.g. cancer screening)
Tertiary prevention: Stopping the disease progressing any further (e.g. treatment to stop HIV – AIDS)
What is beatties’s typology of health promotion?
Health Persuasion | Legislative action
Personal counselling | Community development
________________________
Authoritative vs negotiated intervention
and
Individual focus vs. collective focus
What is health persuasion?
- Includes mass media campaigns, such as sexual health and health eating
- For example, 5-a-day TV campaign, Screening adverts (smear test campaign)
What is legislative action?
- Passing a law to promote health
* For example, laws that subsidise the price of healthy food or sugar tax or smoking ban
What is personal counselling?
- Opportunistic prevention in consultations
* For example, GP advice on smoking/drinking
What is community development?
- Locally based initiatives
* For example, communities producing and distributing food themselves/ Sure start and health action zones
Medical ethics applied to health promotion
Example: MMR immunisation (concerns regarding association with autism)
• Autonomy = respecting parents views (however parents aren’t the patient)
• Beneficence = protecting the individual child
• Non-maleficence = all interventions carry risk
Justice= protect community
What is health education?
- Learning experiences designed to facilitate voluntary actions conductive to health
- Happens through mass media campaigns and through advice from health professionals
What is health protection?
- Legislation to protect public health
* Includes seat belts, smoking ban