Ethical Behaviour and Values in Optometry
The rise of social media has been combined with the emergence of specific ethical issues that didn’t exist before. Those ethical issues affect business, healthcare, as well as eye care. In Optometry the main concerns are preserving the doctor-patient relationship, patient privacy, records security, and business confidentiality. The most recommended thing in preventing any of these issues from happening is to have separate personal and professional social media accounts. Another recommendation is to only use encrypted and secured platforms when you want to communicate or discuss with patients about medical cases, this way, ensuring patients’ confidentiality.
Ethical behavior is a broad domain and dealing with ethical issues in healthcare, business, and Optometry is a great challenge. Whereas major ethical issues are covered by laws, the conditions and rules for many other ethical issues may not be covered by any law. Those cases put Optometrists and managers in a blurred situation where they have to make decisions on their own, based on common sense and morals to hold employees and themselves liable to ethical issues in the workplace.
Among the ethical issues, we hear every day in business are discrimination, harassment, unethical accounting, privacy and confidentiality issues, safety, misuse of leadership authority, nepotism and favoritism, mishandling, and misuse of company’s data and intellectual property.
Globally in healthcare, major ethical issues include big data issues as they relate to processing large amounts of patient’s data using advanced predictive algorithms. Issues appear when researchers have collected blood and tissue samples for future research with a patient’s informed consent permitting to be used once. Other issues relate to safeguarding patient privacy in population health data, restraining patient care decisions due to financial considerations, ethical usage of artificial intelligence and robotics in healthcare, and arranging rapid, accurate, and ethical responses to pandemics and other widespread emergencies.
In Optometry, most ethical issues that relate to business and healthcare find significant soil in our day to day work. The Optometrist Code of Conduct by the World Council of Optometry (WCO) includes and reminds us of nine important duties of every Optometrist. The American Optometric Association (AOA) has always delivered statements of ethical aspirations and standards of expected professional behavior and responsibilities to the public, patients, fellow optometrists, colleagues, and other healthcare professionals. The Code of Ethics, Optometric Oath, and Standards of Professional Conduct are documents that guide members of AOA. Those documents can guide and be a great inspiration to all eye care professionals around the world because they are current and regularly updated to cover new ethical issues. Ethical issues related to social media are widely detailed at the AOA webpage.