Education in care ethics: a way to increase palliative care awareness in India

Abstract

In India, the private healthcare sector is rapidly growing. The focus on profit and curative treatment in this sector carries the danger of overtreatment and lack of attention to types of care where the margin of profit is limited, such as palliative care. Since further expansion of the private healthcare sector is unavoidable and even necessary due to limited government spending on healthcare in India, ways to promote palliative care awareness in such an environment need to be found. An important step towards this goal is the development of healthcare ethics education with a focus on those ethical theories which are most appropriate from a socio-cultural perspective. Principlism, the dominant model in Western healthcare ethics which applies the principles autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence and justice to ethical cases, may not be most suited to the Indian context. Principlism very strongly focuses on individualistic autonomy. Although autonomy can obviously not be neglected in Indian healthcare, ethical theories which pay more attention to relational aspects may be more appropriate. In this context, Care Ethics appears as a valuable ethical theory. Moreover, the focus on caring relationships in Care Ethics clearly points to the need of palliative care. Development of socio-culturally appropriate healthcare ethics education can inculcate ethical sensitivity which will benefit palliative care in India.