Advocacy in Health Care - Essay Example

Advocacy is supporting patients' positive decision-making and enabling positive behavior, such as encouraging the patient to attend fitness classes, health-related seminars, encouraging compliance with medication, and active engagement of physicians and patients (improving health care advocacy through engagement).

The patients should be educated about their disorder in a way that enables a good understanding i.e. the description of their disease, its reasons for occurrence, its treatment, and the challenges and rewards of the life after treatment (Improving health and healthcare advocacy through engagement, 2012). All these aspects of care and treatment goals should be discussed with the patient to enable them to make an informed decision about their treatment, and ensuring this occurs is an important role of the patient advocate

Advocacy becomes even more important in the case of research, where the patients should know the aims and objectives of the research and their participation should only be confirmed after their consent is gained. It is highly unethical and immoral to conduct research on a patient without his or her consent because at times the research includes such objectives which harm the patient in many ways. Before conducting the research, the researcher should personally meet are patients who will be their subjects and should try to communicate every single detail to them after which the final decision of becoming a part of the research or not would be sole of the patient.

There are many healthcare supporting services that provide advocacy to the health care consumers by enabling them to understand their health issues and their possible solutions. Advocacy does not mean that one has to compel the subject to become a part of the research. If it is not conducted in this manner then the patient’s self-respect and dignity are challenged and they start hiding the insensitive information which leads to a lack of confidence between patient and health care provider (Improving health and healthcare advocacy through engagement, 2012).

Example:

There are many examples of the unethical and illegal attitudes of health care providers which they maintain while conducting any research. One example of such an unethical activity is the removal of healthy and developing embryos from the mother’s womb for conducting research on it. The embryo was then placed at a laboratory for the medical students’ further research projects. The other side of this issue is that a mother lost her child even before birth and her consent was not given to conduct this research. In such a situation the mother who was a normal person before the accident can lose her senses and become abnormal. There are also chances that she becomes physically unhealthy to give birth to another child.

This is an extreme case where advocacy could help the healthcare providers, the patient, and researchers. This research could have been facilitated by informing the mother of the intention and methods of the research and respecting her wishes to either be included or not included in the study