Developing Organizational Standards
Ethics Tools
Determine the Organizational Foundation for Ethical Decisions
- Golden Rule: ideal, greatest benefit for greatest number
- Silver Rule: avoiding harm, a minimum requirement for ethical conduct
- Tin Rule: acknowledging the potential for harm and the best interest for stakeholders, and then seeking the lesser of two harms
Clarify the Organizational Standard
- Golden rule: the best healthcare for the greatest numbers of people
- Silver rule: (doing more than avoiding harm but not fully committed to the best healthcare for the greatest number of people)
- Tin rule: pursuit of good without violating the rights of stakeholders.
Initiate a Process for Making Ethical Decisions
- Clarify harms to affected parties and seek the lesser harm
- Weigh the potential harms, the consequences in terms of seriousness & quantity
- Clarify the commonly accepted rules and norms for the culture/community; this includes consideration of organizational, professional and cultural norms
- Determine mitigating circumstances, chiefly, the capacity to act with knowledge and freedom
- Develop strategies to minimize harm to those who may be harmed
Develop Criteria for Outcome
- Seek the best that can be done
- Clarify the minimal criteria for organizational ethics (standard you wont go below)
- Disseminate the accepted rules
- Act with consistency
- Seek ways to compensate the vulnerable and disadvantaged
This overview reflects the ideas of: Spitzer, RJ. 1998. Rekindling spirit in the organization. Haddad, A. 1998. AThe future of ethical decisionmaking in healthcare.@ Nursing Clinics of North America 33 (2): 373-384; Toyrv, E., Herve, R., Mutka, R., Savolainen, P. & Seppanen, M. 1998. Ethics in healthcare: developing an instrument to assess humane caring. Nursing Ethics 5, (3):228-235; Young, R. & Bowen, R. 1999. On and off the playing field: ethics in medicine. Journal of Healthcare for the Poor and Underserved 10, (2):178-185
