Romanian Society of Pharmaceutical Sciences

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CODES OF DEONTOLOGY FOR HEALTH PROFESSIONALS – A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

OFELIA CRIŞAN1*, SPERANŢA IACOB2

1.Department of Pharmaceutical Legislation and Management, “Iuliu Haţieganu” University of Medicine and Pharmacy Cluj-Napoca, 12 Ion Creangă Street, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
2.Romanian College of Pharmacists, Cluj Branch, 4 Aurel Vlaicu Street, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

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Good physician-pharmacist collaboration can improve the quality of healthcare services. In practice, however, purely mercantile associations and agreements between some of these professionals show that education and ethics have failed somewhere along the way. The aim of the paper was to study the conception of the Romanian professional associations of physicians and pharmacists regarding appropriate professional behaviour, by analysing their codes of deontology and drawing up suggestions to optimize the professional ethics. The two codes of deontology in force were investigated using the comparative method. Although both codes establish as ethical obligations the professional responsibility, protection of professional independence and observance of the patient’s rights, they need to be complemented in the field of the responsibility for the management of health resources, the explicit condemnation of allowing one’s judgment to be influenced by personal profit, and respectively of observing the patients’ right to privacy, to their own time, to safety, to innovation, to avoid unnecessary suffering and pain, to compensation. The professional ethics of physicians and pharmacists can be optimized by harmonizing the codes of deontology with the relevant international documents, by providing ethical training to their members and by the collaboration between their professional associations.