Whose Job Is It to Care (If Not Mine)?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2025
How much do we care when no one is looking? A patient with critical injury and vulnerable to bias—as an uninsured Person of Color experiencing homelessness and social isolation, with a history of mental illness and drug use— experiences barriers to receiving necessary treatment and standard care. When a patient is unable to ask for help, and has no family member or friend to help, what standard of care can they hope to receive? Can the quality of care provided to unrepresented patients represent a hospital’s culture of care? The writer wonders whether to “stay in my lane” and focus only on the ethical question prompting consultation, or if the principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence justify speaking up about substandard care. To mitigate the risk of acting as the “ethics police” by engaging in micromanagement of patient care, the writer describes efforts to expand ethics’ scope to change systemic and cultural attitudes by establishing preventative measures to identify and combat bias and preemptive judgments of futility.
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