Doubly distributing special obligations: what professional practice can learn from parenting

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dc.citation.journalTitleJournal of Medical Ethics
dc.contributor.authorTilburt, Jon
dc.contributor.authorBrody, Baruch A.
dc.date.accessioned2016-07-06T19:28:53Z
dc.date.available2016-07-06T19:28:53Z
dc.date.issued2016
dc.description.abstractA traditional ethic of medicine asserts that physicians have special obligations to individual patients with whom they have a clinical relationship. Contemporary trends in US healthcare financing like bundled payments seem to threaten traditional conceptions of special obligations of individual physicians to individual patients because their population-based focus sets a tone that seems to emphasise responsibilities for groups of patients by groups of physicians in an organisation. Prior to undertaking a cogent debate about the fate and normative weight of special obligations and a traditional ethic for contemporary healthcare, we need a deeper examination of what the traditional ethic of special obligations really means. Here we offer a conception of ‘doubly distributed’ special obligations. Physicians and similarly minded healing professionals abiding by a traditional ethic have always spread their devotion and attention across multiple patients and have shared responsibilities with physician and non-physician colleagues in much the same way devoted parents have frequently distributed their special obligations across multiple children and across multiple parents. By taking up the extended analogy of parent we argue that doubly distributing special obligations need not contradict the possibility of special obligations in restructured collective forms of healthcare delivery and financing.
dc.identifier.citationTilburt, Jon and Brody, Baruch A.. "Doubly distributing special obligations: what professional practice can learn from parenting." <i>Journal of Medical Ethics,</i> (2016) BMJ Publishing Group Ltd?& Institute of Medical Ethics: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2015-103071.
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2015-103071
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/90811
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherBMJ Publishing Group Ltd?& Institute of Medical Ethics
dc.rightsThis is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial.
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
dc.titleDoubly distributing special obligations: what professional practice can learn from parenting
dc.typeJournal article
dc.type.dcmiText
dc.type.publicationpublisher version
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