At some point in our lives, we will all need to be cared for. When that happens, it is of course crucial that the people who care for us have the medical competence and skills required to diagnose and treat us. But we also need professional care to be nursed back to health. Providing care requires both medical and ethical skills, for example when weighing risks against the benefits of treatment and when giving information or encouraging patients to follow advice and instructions. Patients also need to be given tools and space to exercise their autonomy when making decisions about their own treatment and care. As a researcher in care ethics, this is the kind of questions that I ponder: questions that matter to us throughout life. The one who brings us into this world will need care during pregnancy, birth and after delivering the baby. Newborns, premature babies and children that are injured during birth need to be cared for, together with their families. As a child, you might have an ear infection, or need patching up after falling off your bike. As adults, illness will visit us on several occasions, and being cared for at the end of life is of utmost importance. We often face difficult choices in relation to health, sickness and treatment and need support from health care professionals in order to make autonomous decisions. Care ethics encompasses all of these ethical dilemmas.
The ethical aspects of the encounter between the health care professional and the patient are at the centre of care ethics. This encounter is always asymmetrical. How can we make it a respectful encounter, given that professionals have more knowledge and patients are put in a dependent and exposed position? As individual patients in health care, we are not on home ground, while the health care professional is in a familiar work environment and practices their profession. This asymmetry places great ethical demands on how the meeting between patient and professional takes place. It is precisely in this encounter that the dilemmas of health care ethics arise. However, as a care ethics researcher, I also ask questions about how health care is organised and whether that enables good and ethically acceptable encounters.
Those who organise the health care system and the people providing care need to know something about what is best for the patient. To be able to offer concrete guidance on how to educate, budget, plan and perform care, the ethical dilemmas that arise in health care encounters need to be examined in a structured way. Care ethics offers both theoretical and empirical tools to do just that. The theoretical framework builds in part on traditional principle-based ethics, and in part on the ethics of care. In this tradition, nursing and care are seen as both value and practice. The practice includes moral values, but also gives rise to norms that can guide moral action by rejecting acts of violence and dominance towards other human beings. The ethics of care looks to the needs of the “concrete other.” It considers us as individuals in mutually dependent relationships with one another. It also ascribes emotions a moral value. But not just any emotions; mainly those that are connected to nursing and caring for others, for example compassion and empathy.
Over the years, the care ethics group at the Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics (CRB) have worked with several different questions. Mona Petterson wrote her PhD thesis on how doctors and nurses view do-not-resuscitate orders. Amal Matar’s thesis covered ethical issues in relation to genetic screening before pregnancy, also known as preconception genetic screening. We have also worked with caregivers’ experiences of health care prioritization, how parents and children view vaccination ethics, and equal access to health care. Our approach to care ethics is rooted in clinical practice and our studies are mainly informed by empirical ethics, where ethical and philosophical reasoning is related to qualitative and quantitative empirical research. Our goal is to contribute concrete clinical guidance on how to manage the ethical dilemmas that health care is faced with. Given the fact that we are all born, and live and die, it is also a given that we all will require care at one point or another. In order to enable health care policy makers and administrators to make decisions that benefit patients, talking about ethics in terms of medical risk versus benefit is not enough. As patients, we are human beings in an asymmetrical relationship where we are dependent on the person offering us care. The ethical dilemmas that arise from that relationship matter for how we perceive the treatment and care we receive. They also affect the extent to which we can exercise our autonomy.
Written by…
Anna T. Höglund, who is Professor of Care Ethics and Gender Studies at Uppsala University’s Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics.
In dialogue with patients
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