This essay explains my reasons for choosing the PA career, the aspects of clinical practice I will value, and the ethical principles that will help guide my ethical decision making in clinical practice.

My choice to pursue a career as a PA was based on many reasons. The primary reason was because of my experience with PAs treating my family members. When I was six years old, my mother was severely injured and was rushed to hospital. One of the most vivid memories I have of this experience is the way that the PA who cared for my mother and helped restore her health. This allowed her to go back to work and continue supporting my grandparents and me. Years later, I had similar experiences watching PAs competently and effectively treat my grandparents when they both fell ill. With these experiences, I felt the need to help others and I came to the realization that that the PA career was the perfect fit for me.

The aspect of clinical practice that I believe will be the most crucial to me as a clinician is having sufficient clinical skills and knowledge.  Having these clinical skills and knowledge is important because not only will it help me follow in the footsteps of the PAs that influenced me, but it will also help me become a competent clinician. By being a competent PA, I will be able to provide effective and efficient treatment for my patients.  Another aspect which is important to me is the ability to build rapport with my patients. I believe this is a critical clinical aspect because it can help invoke trust and confidence from my patients. Trust and confidence in one’s clinician is also another factor which I believe to be important in effectively treating my patients.

In order to guide my ethical decision making in clinical practice, I believe beneficence would be the most conducive. Beneficence means to benefit or do good for a person, in the medical scope this means to help/treat the people that are sick (Yeo, 2010). This is a central ethical principle to the health care field, mostly due to the fact that it helps guide the health care field in everyday practice. Beneficence will be critical in helping to guide my ethical decision-making skills because one of my reasons for choosing the medical field is my strong belief in benefiting and promoting the welfare of the patients. It is with the use of my clinical knowledge and skills that I will be able to treat and benefit my patients. I believe the more clinical competence I have, the greater the impact I will have on my patients.

Dignity and confidentiality are other ethical principles that I believe will be essential in guiding my ethical decision-making skills. Dignity, in its simplest definition, would be defined as having value or moral worth as a human being (Sulmasy, 2013). I believe that all patients that come to seek medical aid should be treated with dignity. Having dignity towards a patient will play a strong role in helping me to provide quality care. Viewing all patients as having dignity can make a great impact on the clinician-patient relationship. A patient that is treated with dignity would be more cooperative, and can help build a relationship that can be conducive to better patient compliance and treatment. Additionally, patients need to be treated with proper dignity, not only because it will help build better relationship with patients, but because it is the morally right thing to do. Without the prioritization of dignity, health care itself would change in nature and become a more desensitized field.

Confidentiality is another ethical principle that I believe is critical to guiding ethical decision-making skills. Confidentiality is defined as the management of patient information by the clinician (Kirk, 2010). Prioritizing a patient’s privacy and information is one the hallmarks of modern medicine and can help a patient develop faith in the clinician’s abilities. Confidentiality has many other factors affecting it but with optimal function of these factors it can help establish and develop trust, confidence, and rapport between the patient and clinician (Kirk, 2010). It is due to this that I believe that confidentiality is essential to helping me develop proper rapport/trust with the patient.

Through this essay, I have illustrated the reasons for becoming a physician assistant, the aspects of clinical practice I will value more, and the ethical principles that will help guide my ethical decision making in clinical practice.

                                                         

Work cited

Kirk, Timothy W.  “Confidentiality.”  In Nathan Cherny, Marie Fallon, Stein Kaasa, Russell          

Portenoy, & David Currow, eds.  Oxford Textbook of Palliative Medicine. (5th ed.)  New York/London:  Oxford University Press, 2015, 279-284.

Sulmasy, D. P. (2013). The varieties of human dignity: a logical and conceptual analysis. Med Health Care and Philosophy, 937-944.

Yeo, M., Moorhouse, A., Khan, P., & Rodney, P. (2010). Beneficence. In M. Yeo, A.      

Moorhouse, P. Khan, & P. Rodney, Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics (p. 103).Broadview Press.