Health care delivery has become institutionalized. As a result, health care organizations now have the power to determine who has access to what kind of health care and under what circumstances. They shape as well the ethics of the various health care professions. These developments have provoked controversies about what kind of obligations such health care organizations have to patients, caregivers, and society at large. In order to respond to these controversies, an account of health care organizational ethics has become necessary.
The essays in this volume: -are drawn from an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars in this growing field;

-address the nature of health care organizational ethics, including such issues as corporate fraud and institutional moral integrity;

-cover the broad range of issues that must be addressed for a coherent discussion of organizational moral responsibility;

-cover the range of theoretical and practical issues like no other volume;

-are of interest to researchers, students and professionals working in the fields of bioethics, health care administration and management, organizational science, and business ethics.

"This is a splendid contribution. There is nothing like it in the literature. It is not just the first substantive exploration of practical issues that fall under the rubric health care organizational ethics, but it also begins the important task of exploring the nature of the field itself."
(Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Ph.D., M.D.)
"This volume is much needed, given the increasingly-observed shifts in health care, namely that health care is less and less carried out between a doctor and patient, and more and more carried out between a group of individuals and a patient .... This volume reflects on the kinds of standards that should be in place for institutions, from whence these standards come, how they are changed, implemented, and evaluated, who takes responsibility, and untold other avenues."
(Jeffrey Bishop, M.D.)

Inhalt
Institutional Integrity in Health Care: Essential for Organizational Ethics.- Inference Gaps in Moral Assessment and the Moral Agency of Health Care Organizations.- Institutional Integrity in Health Care: Tony Soprano and Family Values.- Sustaining Institutional Ethos and Integrity: Management in a Postmodern Moment.- Business Ethics, Organization Ethics and Systems Ethics for Health Care.- The Health Care Institution/Patient Relationship.- Creating an Institutional Ethical Identity.- Institutional Integrity.- Institutional Integrity through Periods of Significant Change.- Organizational Ethics: Moral Obligation and Integrity.- Notes on Contributors.