Meghan Root's E-Portfolio
Research Pathway
Personal Touch on Healthcare
Fall semester of my junior year I enrolled in PHIL 321, Medical Ethics. Throughout the duration of the course, we learned a lot about what is right and what is wrong, the main takeaway of the course being “your moral compass.” A lot of class time was spent discussing a situation and trying to decide what the “right” thing to do would be. For example, a train is coming down the tracks and on one track there is one person and on the other track there is a group of people. The train is heading towards the group of people, but you have the power to pull a lever and change the direction of the train so it hits the one person, not the group. What would you do? Another, more realistic ethical situation we talked about was human research and the right and wrong aspects of it. I took a closer look at the ethical and medical implications of human research in my The aforementioned situations are both very difficult because in both people are potentially dying. My professor had said this relates to medical ethics because for those of you going into the medical field you will be making difficult decisions every day. Not necessarily decisions pertaining to life or death situations but always pertaining to someone’s life. He said, as a medical professional, you have to learn how to separate your feelings from the decision you have to make or you’ll never be able to make the decision that is best for the patient.
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So much of healthcare is based on ethics because you are constantly making decisions about someone’s life but on top of that, you need to keep in mind that you are talking to a human being and you want to be sympathetic and compassionate. You need to gather all of the facts, diagnose the patient, and come up with a care plan, but you have to do those things keeping in mind that you are talking to another human being, not just another medical case. You also have to keep in mind that when you are doing something that is best for one patient, it may not be best for the other patient (in the case of the mother and baby example). These ideas have stuck with me, and I still think of treating patients like normal people, regardless of why they’re in the hospital. My knowledge of medical ethics and how to be compassionate while still being able to give your patient all of the important facts they need to know will help me be the best I can be as an aspiring physicians assistant.
Currently, I am a personal touch volunteer in the Nesting Place at Palmetto Health Hospital. I have been volunteering there for about a year now and have total volunteering. As a personal touch volunteer in the nesting place, I work with new mothers and their babies and there are many times where I find myself going back to what my medical ethics professor said. One of the first times in my life where I was able to experience medical ethics in the real world was in my volunteering experience at Palmetto Health hospital. Unfortunately, at the hospital there are a few babies that are born addicted to drugs. When a baby is born addicted to drugs and going through withdrawal, there is a process medical professionals have to go through in order to ensure the babies safety. Witnessing this process was a prime example of how you need to separate your feelings from what is best for someone. Obviously in this case, what is best for the baby is most important, but still as a human being you feel slightly bad for the mother. This is a prime example how the doctors have to separate their feelings from the care they are giving. They have to do what is best for their one patient (the baby), but at the same time they’re taking the baby away from its mother, which in her eyes is not the best thing. It is very difficult to actually watch this while it is happening because it is an extremely difficult situation. But it is the morally, ethically and legally right thing to do.
This is the unit that I volunteer on during my shifts on Wednesday's and Sunday's.