Ethics

Introduction to Health Education: Ethics, Definitions, and Responsibilities

• Ethics in geriatric care include compassion, equity, fairness, dignity, confidentiality, and autonomy within the person's abilities and mental capacity.
• Ethical concepts guide professional behavior and facilitate decision-making based on moral reasoning of what is right and wrong.
• Ethics justify what is right or good, while morals are principles and rules of right conduct that are private or personal.
• Rules provide guidelines for the relationship between clients and healthcare providers, including the ethical principles of veracity, fidelity, and confidentiality.
• Types of ethics include descriptive, normative, and analytical, with normative ethics addressing the scope of practice and competence expected of nurses.
• Health educators have a responsibility to uphold the highest possible standards of conduct and encourage ethical behavior in their work.
• Health educators must consider all issues and principles of individual responsibility to educate, promote, maintain, and improve the health of individuals, families, groups, and communities.
• Health education aims to provide people and local communities with information, resources, and solutions to make healthier lifestyle decisions.
• An educational course is a unit of teaching that typically lasts one academic term, led by one or more instructors, and covers an individual subject.
• The health education setting is any place where the process of health education takes place.
• The general purpose of patient education is to change health risk behavior to healthy behavior, improve, promote, and maintain health status, and provide psychological support to patients.
• Types of educational courses include lecture courses, seminars, colloquiums or reading courses, tutorial courses, directed individual study courses, and laboratory courses, with various kinds of work from students in the course.