Social Responsibility and Ethics in Health Care

The notion of social responsibility and ethics has been widely examined in a range of different industries. There is subtle and implicit relationship between morality and responsibility. Individuals are responsible for their moral actions and articulate their responsibilities for themselves. Each individual tends to adopt different personal lens to examine moral responsibility or social responsibility in a particular setting. Nowadays, global companies have been involved in a spate of corporate scandals, such as product safety, labour exploitation, and data security issues. Stakeholders tend to lose confidence in purchasing their major products, questioning the quality of services and validity of the disclamation of product labelling. Governments, industries, or nongovernmental organisations tend to develop different legislations, standards, and guidelines to enforce the companies to follow or comply. In order to restore public confidence, minimise potential reputational risk, and forestall stringent regulations, companies tend to follow international reporting guidelines, industry standards, or codes of ethics in the particular industry. This chapter introduces the concept of morality and ethics and provides a general overview of four major ethical theories and approaches. Then, it is followed by corporate scandals and issue management, the global trends of sustainable reporting practices, and four major social aspects of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) that are related to the health-care settings.