Linking Ethical Standards for Healthcare Professionals with Indian Cultural Values Ethical standard-setting rooted in cultural values for healthcare professionals in India.

Abstract

Ethical standards of healthcare sector are important to the lives of people because healthcare is a profession that impacts the lives of people, their families and society. Healthcare professionals are inevitably involved in ethical decision-making in their working lives and address a conflict regarding competing values such as personal, organizational, professional, and community values. India is a country in South Asia where people are diverse in ethnicity, religion, and culture. So, revealing commonly accepted ethical standards for resolving ethical conflicts for healthcare professionals becomes more relevant for India. However, the research on this issue is limited. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to reveal the link between ethical standards for healthcare professionals in general and Indian cultural values such as Dharma, Nishkama Karma and Jnana.

This paper used a scoping review to screen the relevant articles which were selected from the Scopus and Google Scholar databases. The keywords used for searching the research articles were “ethical standard”, “ethics”, “healthcare ethics”, and “Indian cultural values”. Then, the constructs of healthcare ethics were identified and the relevant ethical standards for each construct were not only evaluated based on the two key theoretical viewpoints namely deontology and teleology, but also justified by Indian cultural values.