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Physician’s Duty To Provide Care To The Infected Patient: Where Is The Limit?
Murat CİVANERa
aTıp Tarihi ve Deontoloji ABD, Uludağ Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi, BURSA
Risks of occupational contagious diseases confronted by physicians have been brought to public agenda again by AIDS, SARS and recent avian-flu epidemics. Physicians have many kinds of problems caused by this problem, and sometimes might refuse to care by using various reasons. Does a physician have a duty to care, even in an outbreak which jeopardize her own health and life? If there is a limit for the duty to care, then how could it be determined, and which diseases or situations would be below that limit? The aim of this article to construct a viewpoint about how to determine the limit of physicians’ duty to care in different circumstances. To do that, first, regulations and codes about morality of medicine, and then, by taking into consideration the arguments in the literature and the phases of struggling with contagious diseases, the limit of duty to provide care has been tried to determine. Besides, by considering the right to health, the right way to act was dealt in case of serology of patient is unknown and the circumstances beyond the duty to care.Keywords: Physicians; physician-patient relations; communicable diseases; ethics, professional, refusal to treatTurkiye Klinikleri J Med Ethics 2007, 15:166-175
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