Ethical Practice of a Health Care Agency SLP5 - Essay Example

This commission has formulated a set of guidelines which is known as the Belmont Report (National commission for the protection of human subjects of biomedical and behavioral research, 1978). Now a days, all the government funded health care agencies in USA implement this report for ethical conduct of medical research conducted for persons Agency for health care quality research and quality (AHRQ) is one of the important health care agencies of USA which follows the guidelines for effective implementation of ethical codes and procedures.

Department of health and human services (HHS) is the primary health agency of government of USA which caters the needs of health of all the American citizens and ensure human services prioritizing the needy persons at the time of emergency (HHS, 2013). It covers maximum population in terms of federal outlays and health insurance coverage. It works in close coordination with central and state government agencies and private sector grantees for faster implementation of health protection schemes.

While implementing health practices such as research and experimentation, HHS follows a set of ethical norms and regulations. Let us examine them here: HHS implements several regulations for enhancing and sustaining the ethical principles. For example, for catering the urgent needs of children and other family members, it has initiated Federal monitoring of child and family service programmes. In addition, child support enforcement programme and tribal child welfare programmes were also aimed at benefiting children of disadvantageous groups suffering from different health problems.

Similarly, expanding the list of cancer types under the World Trade Centre Health Porgramme and transfer of funds to the needy families in terms of health emergency also come under implementation of basic ethical principles in a government funded health agency such as HHS. HHS follows the ethical guidelines as prescribed in Belmont report which are commonly referred as Common Rule (45 CFR 46). All Federal Agencies of USA who are involved in human health care research and experimentation adopted these common rules which is instrumental in successful implementation of ethical principles.

The precautions such as assessment of potential risks associated preclinical and clinical health research studies is mandatory before conducing any research on pregnant women as per the code of ethics and standard of procedure strictly followed by HHS. The similar norms are also applicable to research and experimentation to be conducted on neonates. In cases of multi-institutional cooperative health research projects, the individual institutes are given responsibility of successful implementation of health safety norms and ethical principles.

Some associations such as National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) play vital role in ensuring implementation of ethical principles in medical research and experimentation (NAHQ, 2011). The code of ethics and standard of practices for healthcare quality professionals were defined clearly which should be implemented by all the health care agencies including HHS. The code of ethics expected form healthcare researchers include integrity, confidentiality, honesty, commitment, accountability and