PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

David T Ozar

Publications and source records attributed to David T Ozar.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Ethics, access, and care.

There are two very different ways of understanding access and care that are at work in contemporary American society. One of these is the understanding that our society's health professions have about access and care as they consider their ethical commitment to respond to patients' oral health needs. The other is how these matters are understood within America's public culture. In this view, needs--including health care needs--are no different in kind or ethical significance from unmet desires of any sort. This article will spell out the differences between these two ways of understanding care and access. Comprehending the distance that separates the health professions' perspective from much of mainstream American thinking on these matters is essential to a careful discussion of the ethics of access to oral health care.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed2006

Basic oral health needs: A public priority.

Is there a way to support a special ethical status for unmet oral health needs within our pluralistic, liberty-loving American society? Some people in American society, perhaps many people, believe that some kinds of human needs have special ethical importance. But very few people outside the oral health professions have ever considered that unmet oral health needs might belong to this category. This article will examine why some kinds of needs are thought to have special ethical importance and propose that certain categories of oral health care are needs that fit this description. Without thinking these issues through, we who argue for improved access to oral health care will remain unable to provide an adequate answer to a very legitimate question, namely: improved access to what? When this task has been completed, the article will consider some of the implications of such a view for our society.

Dental Care↗
PubMed1992

Hospitals and moral imperatives: hospital ethics.

... Because institutional ethics has been neglected, there is a tendency in our institutional life to apply moral principles with which we are familiar from our personal life. However, principles from individual ethics often distort institutional ethics. Ethical problems in the hospital are not exactly the same as ethical problems that arise when individual doctors treat individual patients. And when the problems are similar, the ethical principles by which we should resolve them are likely to be quite different. To begin to make a case for taking hospital ethics seriously, I briefly examine two familiar principles of individual doctor-patient ethics that look different, or should look different, in the setting of a hospital. I then discuss ethics committees -- one of the most important ways in which hospital ethics is put into practice.

Administrative Personnel↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Finding a voice. Like individuals, organizations are moral speakers and actors.

Though "good people' are important for the life of any organization, it is a myth to think that enough good people will make for a good organization. To break free of this myth, a health care organization, which is made up of numerous persons and groups, ought to be regarded as a single, unitary actor in society. When seen as a single actor, the organization's systems for carrying out its mission can be better assessed and improved if necessary. If the organization's systems are not functioning as they should, then even good people will be hindered in their efforts. It can be said, therefore, that organizational ethics takes seriously the idea that every Catholic health care organization is a moral actor needing to reflect carefully on what it does in relation to its employees, leaders, and the outside community. In an environment where the organization's actions are reflected upon, and its character is carefully and continually shaped according to its mission, individual persons in that organization will be better equipped for making and carrying out good decisions that are aligned with that same regard for the mission.

Catholicism↗