Sense, Aims and
Peculiarities of General
Care of Surgical Patients
1. What is Patient’ care?

Patient care is the core responsibility of a medical
practitioner. They have to assure that the patient is
given the best possible care. In hospitals or any other
medical institution, the doctors and nurses take care
of their patients very carefully.

It contributes to a more positive patient recovery
experience and can improve the physical and mental
quality of life for people with serious illnesses, such as
cancer.
2. Types of Patient’s care

The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses
Delegation Handbook suggests that there are two types of
patient care

1. Direct patient care refers to activities that assist the
patient in meeting their basic needs.

2. Indirect patient care refers to activities that focus on
maintaining the environment in which nursing care is
delivered and only incidentally involves direct patient
care.
3. Medical Ethics

Medical ethics is based on a set of values that professionals can refer to in the
case of any confusion or conflict. A conflict may arise leading to the need for
hierarchy in an ethical system, such that some moral elements overrule
others with the purpose of applying the best moral judgement to a difficult
medical situation.

Medical ethics is particularly relevant in decisions regarding involuntary
treatment and involuntary commitment. Values of medical ethics include:

Non-maleficence

Beneficence

Health maximisation

Efficiency

Respect for autonomy

Justice

Proportionality
4. Deontology

Medical Deontology - is professional ethics of
medical workers and principles of behavior of
medical personnel, directed toward maximum
benefit of treatment.

It is a set of ethical standards and principles of
behaviour of medical workers while executing
their professional duties.
5. Behaviour of Primary and Secondary
Medical Personnel in Compliance with Ethical
Standards

Medical workers have no right to disclose any data concerning patient that
have deeply personal character. However, this requirement does not concern
to the situations representing danger to other people: venereal and infectious
diseases, infecting with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), poisonings, etc.

In these cases medical workers are obliged to inform the respective
organizations about the received data immediately. With the purpose of
carrying out sanitary-and-epidemiologic actions in the centre of infectious
diseases’ occurrence, food poisoning or pediculosis, nurse is obliged to
inform, within 12 hours from the moment of determining the diagnosis, the
respective sanitary-and-epidemiologic station by phone and simultaneously to
direct there the filled form of the emergency notification

Informed consent is a voluntary patient acceptance
of treatment or therapeutic procedures after
providing adequate medical information.
Informed consent can be divided into two stages:
 1.Provision of information
 2. Obtaining consent.

Stage 1: Provision of information includes the notion of voluntariness and
competence
The doctor must inform the patient about:

Nature and purpose of the proposed treatment;

An associated significant risk; i.e. physician should affect the four aspects of
risk: its nature, severity, probability of its materialization and surprise its
materialization.

Possible alternative to this kind of treatment (doctor gives advice about the
most appropriate from a medical point of view of form, but the final decision
is made by the patient).

Stage 2: Obtaining consent

Informed consent implies the non-use by physicians of coercion, deception,
threats in decision-making by the patient.

In the field of medical ethics is dominated by two moral theory: deontological
and utilitarian.