Scenario 1: One of the physicians on staff is telling you about a study that he

Question

Scenario 1: One of the physicians on staff is telling you about a study that he is doing on his patients. He hopes to have the study published and to receive a grant to expand his research. He offers to hire you to help him with the data collection during your off hours. You accept and begin helping him. You start collecting data. When you access the file the next day, you realize that he has removed a number of patients from the study. You suspect that they were removed intentionally, but you cannot be sure. You put your suspicions aside and proceed with your work and add more patients to the database. A few days later, more patients have been removed from the database. When you do some investigation, you discover that the patients who were removed were sicker and/or had a poor outcome. This is a problem and may prevent the rewarding of the grant money to this project.

Scenario 2: You are traveling with your work laptop to a conference and leave it for five minutes at the airport terminal as you go to the bathroom. You asked your colleague to keep an eye on it, but when you return, your colleague has boarded the plane and taken your belongings. As you look through, you realize your laptop is missing. When you confront your colleague, she says it was just there a moment ago and she is certain she brought it on board with her. Your laptop contains secure information regarding your organization and has remote access to your clinical information system. The policy at your organization for a data breach is to call tech support immediately and report the breach. You think it may just be misplaced and begin looking.

Choose one of the scenarios above and answer the following: What challenges are present in the scenario, and what are some steps that can be taken to address them?

What is the relationship between ethics and policy?

Do they always match up with one another?

If individual ethics do not align with organizational policy, what might be the end result?

Explanation / Answer

I have chosen the scenario 2.

The challenges involved here are the possibilities of theft of the laptop and wrong use of secured information of the organization and clinical information through the laptop. The thief may use the information for personal gains and may sell the data to the competitors. The information also can be used to threaten the company for financial gain. There are chances of losing my job or other disciplinary actions for not taking care of such critical asset.

I can address the scenario by taking the actions as per the company policy. As per the company policy I should report the breach to the tech support immediately. It will help them to prevent the access to the database through my laptop. Another step I can take is to search for the laptop in the airport without informing the tech support and seek help from the airport officials for searching the laptop.

The ethics are the factors which decide what is right or wrong in a process or situation and policies are the principles to be followed in the process. Both ethics and policies are directly related and the principles underlying in the policies are used to decide whether the action is ethical or not. In this situation, the ethical decision would be following the company policies and report the incident to the technical support to prevent wrong use of data. If I do not follow the policies and delayed reporting the theft, it would be unethical.

Yes, ethics and policies match with one another in most of the situations. The policies are established by analyzing its consequences on various stakeholders and it ensures fairness to all the stakeholders. The company values are deeply rooted on the policies and the same act as major factor in deciding the ethics in workplace which makes ethics and policies similar. In this case the ethical decision is to follow the company policy.

If the individual ethics do not align with the organizational policy, the individual may allign his actions for his personal gains. This may lead to serious violations of company policies and loss for the organization. Organizations will not allow the policy violators to continue in the role and the end result will be the termination of employment for the individual. In this case if my individual ethics do not align with the organizational policies, I will not report the laptop theft to tech support. Once the organization comes to know about the incident, I would be terminated for not following the policies.

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