Can we accredit hospital ethics

Abstract

Ethics is the norm of human behaviors in everyday life and as an academic discipline is a branch of philosophy. Medical ethics has been regarded as applied and professional ethics in the typology of ethics. The discussion of medical ethics has mostly centered on how health care professionals should behave individually. There is less discussion on how health care organizations should behave. In other words, people are less clear about the concept of organizational ethics in health care settings. Organizational ethics is about how an organization should behave in accordance with ethical principles. It can be perceived as the aggregation of individual ethics within the organization. Aside from the well known four principles of biomedical ethics proposed by Beauchamp and Childress (2001) that are applicable to the analyses both at the individual and organizational levels, health care organizational ethics also have unique aspects.