ETHICAL AND LEGAL PERSPECTIVES IN HEALTHCARE HW

As a healthcare professional, you are among a group of frontline workers. Frontline workers are the backbone of effective health systems. In fact, according to Frontline Health Workers Coalition (2018), “frontline workers play a critical role in providing local context for proven health solutions, and they connect with families and communities to the health system.” Successful policy advocacy and creation is often encouraged by frontline healthcare workers since they are the individuals who interact with the consumers (patients) the most. Your knowledge and perspective are vital to policy and lawmakers as a voice for healthcare consumers and for providing validation/opposition to laws and policy.

Recently the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services announced the “Conscience and Religious Freedom Division” of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The office’s stated goal is to “protect institutions and people who refuse to provide medical assistance based on religious objections.” As noted by HHS (2018), the office is intended to protect religious beliefs. As with most policies, there are opponents and proponents. In general, supporters advocate that the office will protect against religious discrimination while opponents believe the bill will allow for open discrimination against women and LGBTQ individuals.

Information about the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division can be found at the following source: https://www.hhs.gov/conscience/index.html

Conduct additional research on Conscience and Religious Freedom. For your Module 1 SLP assignment, you are to use reasoning (from a healthcare professional perspective) and ethical principles (i.e., Religious Ethics, Normative Ethics, Descriptive Ethics, Applied Ethics, etc.) to compose a 2-page letter to your local Congressman/Congresswoman either in support of or opposition to Conscience and Religious Freedom. This should not be opinion (e.g., avoid “I think” in your paper), but a supported analysis. Your letter should address the following:

Effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Conscience and Religious Freedom to the population that you as a healthcare professional serve.
Rationale for your support/opposition.
Ethical principles that support your position and supporting rationale (why).
Suggestions or recommendations.
Note: You are not graded on your support or opposition, but rather your critical thinking skills in supporting your position, and application of ethical principles. You may also think about referencing pivotal Supreme Court decisions as well (review background cases and supporting information in the Module 1 Background).

Frontline Health Workers Coalition. (2018). Who they are. Retrieved from https://www.frontlinehealthworkers.org/frontline-health-workers/who-they-are/

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument