Primary care ethics is the study of the everyday decisions that primary care clinicians make, such as: how long to spend with a particular patient, how to reconcile their own values and those of their patients, when and where to refer or investigate, how to respect confidentiality when dealing with patients, relatives and third parties. All these decisions involve values as well as facts and are therefore ethical issues. These issues may also involve other workers in primary healthcare, such as receptionists and managers.
Primary care ethics is not a discipline; it is a notional field of study which is simultaneously an aspect of primary health care and applied ethics. De Zulueta argues that primary care ethics has ‘a definitive place on the ‘bioethics map’, represented by a substantial body of empirical research, literary texts and critical discourse (2, 9, 10). The substantial body of research referred to by De Zulueta (9) has a tendency to be issue-specific, such as to do with rationing(11), confidentiality, medical reports, or relationships with relatives.
