Organ Transplantation Ethical Dilemma

Healthcare professionals are often times faced with challenging ethical dilemma, and the decisions made during these difficult instances affect the patient, the patient’s family members, and those involved in the care. Organ transplantation has many ethically controversial debates from all points of view, including the recipient, the donor and the caregivers involved, and these predicaments forecast life or death on the patients implicated. Mr. Mann and Mrs. Bay have serious illnesses that have caused liver cirrhosis and end-stage liver disease, and they both need organ transplantation in order to survive; however, only one donor-matched liver is available. When presented with the case of Mr. Mann and Mrs. Bay, one might be swayed to vote …show more content…
For Mrs. Bay the consequence of transplantation would likely lead to re-infection of the graft organ and eventually graft liver cirrhosis. For Mr. Mann the consequence and outcomes of liver transplantation will likely prolong his life and offer hope for the future. Considering the medical statistics in regards to outcome and long-term recovery, the patient with alcoholism ultimately has a better survival rate than the patient with hepatitis B virus, which is a promotion of allocating rare medical resources according to the utility of the organ. Thus, the resources are used according to the maximum effectiveness of the consequences, a utilitarian ethical avenue to dispersing the liver to the appropriate recipient. Utilitarianism is “one of the most widely used ethical approaches in public health practice” (Butt & Rich, 2012, p. 402). As a consequence, the consideration of how end result benefits the entire populace provides the greatest benefit in the given …show more content…
Mann should receive the liver because the “greatest good” (Butts & Rich, 2012, p. 23) can be achieved from the utility of the resource involved. By way of approach, utilitarian theories aim to aggrandize the betterment of consequence, and these philosophies focus on the utility of the organ and the consequence of using the organ in both potential recipients. One can determine the usefulness of the liver is noticeably pronounced in the case of Mr. Mann after carefully analyzing each consequence, which is most relevant to determining a recipient. Utilitarianism is a neutral and widely accepted course to reaching a fair, maximal benevolent end-result for the most people especially when pertaining to a health care quandary. Maximum restorative health is the absolute goal in organ transplantation, and one can only achieve the most favorable results by using an unbiased methodology in determining allocation of these rare resources, setting aside the judgments of character and declaring the medical advantages and disadvantages as the single most authoritative criteria for determining who should receive the liver, thereby allowing only the facts and objective data to be scrutinized for optimal designation of the