Long-term care is becoming a main component of American health care with medicare home health as the fastest growing part of the Medicare program. Long-term care is complex and takes place in hospitals, single-family or group homes, nursing homes, housing with linked services, and specialized day centers; patient populations include children with developmental disabilities, elderly people with physical disabilities and those with Alzheimer's disease, and adults with AIDS. Long-term care and home services include intravenous administration of medicine, devices for mechanical ventilation, meal preparation, and bathing. Providers of health care include skilled nurses, technicians, therapists, family members, and others. Home health care legal and ethical issues pertain to all involved (Kasper, 1997). This research paper will focus on ethical issues of privacy, terminal illness, human rights, living wills, making living wills mandatory for medicare, social worker's involvement, autonomy, the family role, termination of life support, and the right to die.
Protection of patient information and home care records is an ethical and legal mandate. Home healthcare nurses must maintain this privacy and confidentiality. Confusion exists between privacy and confidentiality, the protection of one does not inherently include protection of the other. The right to privacy has its base in the law. State and federal governmental agencies are prohibited from invading a person's privacy under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Common law developed the concept of individual privacy with the right to be left alone; this became defined as the right to keep personal information from others and prevent intrusion from others into private affairs. Home health care concerns with regard to privacy include the use of a patient's likeness or name for economic advantage without patient consent (for example taking a ph...