Tackling medical ethics

Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2008 | 2:09 a.m.

The ethical practice of medicine is normally one of those academic subjects that gets little public attention, at least when compared with the skyrocketing cost of medical care and the difficulty millions of Americans have in obtaining health insurance. But medical ethics is now a compelling topic in Southern Nevada because of some high-profile events that have caused the public to question the quality of health care it is receiving.

One unsettling episode, uncovered last year by the Las Vegas Sun, involved Las Vegas physicians who broke federal law and state guidelines by profiting from a program intended to provide Nevada’s most medically needy communities with foreign doctors. Another situation was the hepatitis C outbreak revealed in Las Vegas earlier this year that affected as many as 50,000 people and involved an endoscopy center where syringes and single-dose vials of anesthetics were reused.

As reported Sunday by Marshall Allen in the Sun, these events prompted many of the state’s leading health care regulators, educators and professionals to meet at a summit last week at UNLV to tackle medical ethics and ways they could be improved in Nevada. One of the summit’s organizers, Nevada State Medical Association Executive Director Larry Matheis, put it succinctly when he said: “I think there is a sense that something has gone askew and we’ve got to get it straight.”

One summit recommendation that we support is creation of an ethics consortium that would include key representatives of the health care community. The consortium would produce educational resources to remind physicians, nurses and other medical professionals of their ethical duties.

There is no guarantee that a strong educational effort will prevent wrongful health care practices, but a profession that places a high value on ethics not only will improve itself but also will go a long way in restoring the public’s trust.