Organ transplantation is a field of medicine where many ethical principles come to application. Here physicians are required to maintain patients rights through promoting equity and welfare in their practice. As organs are very valuable many guidelines are there to regulate the process of transplantation.
The main aim of the guidelines is to benefit the recipient, without ignoring the donor health. Beneficence, the principle of doing good to others, is applied to promote patients quality of life. Doctors should apply their medical knowledge to allow donor and recipient to undergo transplantation only with high success rate, to avoid unfavorable outcomes (Center for Bioethics, 2004). Furthermore, the ethical principle of autonomy, …show more content…
The opportunity to receive an organ should be far from any race, gender and income level. Equity in term of organ distribution is guided by two main criteria. First is recipient age, in most cases younger individuals have the priority upon older ones, as the number of healthy years an individual will live after transplantation is considered to be one of the main measurement to asses the success of the transplantation. The second followed guideline is the duration of time a patient has been in a waiting list. Simply, who came first deserve to be treated first. It is important to keep in mind that these guidelines are highly flexible, depending on the organ to be transplanted. For example: this guideline is fair when it come to kidney transplant, because transplantation in this situation is not the only available treatment but it is the optimal one. Patient with ESKF can undergo dialysis until they receive the chance for transplantation (Center for Bioethics, 2004). Meanwhile, transplantation means life or death for those with end stage liver disease, that’s why medical urgency is used to prioritize (CPMC, …show more content…
In this case, a doctor is confused between giving the chance of liver transplant to a prisoner or not? What is the right decision to take ethically? Many diseases like hepatitis and cirrhosis damage the liver, also heavy alcohol consumption leads to liver failure. Transplantation is the only available treatment for patients with this condition (UNOS,