Healthcare Ethical Issues There are questions about transplant allocation in relation to the four major ethical principles of medical ethics: beneficence, autonomy, nonmaleficence, and justice. Beneficence is the “obligation of healthcare providers to help people” who need it, autonomy is the “right of patients to make choices” about their own healthcare, nonmaleficence is the “duty of healthcare providers to do no harm,” and justice is the “concept of treating everyone fairly” (“Medical Ethics and Health Care Rationing: Introduction,” n.d., p. 1). When healthcare professionals are forced to make decisions and these decisions “violate one of the four principles of medical ethics” in order for them to adhere to another of these principles, this is considered an ethical dilemma (“Medical ethics and rationing of healthcare: introduction”, nd, p. Bioethicists refer to the four principles of healthcare ethics in their evaluation of the merits and difficulties of medical procedures such as transplants. Organ allocation and/or transplant policies present a mixture of legal, ethical, scientific and many other aspects, however the focus here will be to show how the four ethical principles, autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice, apply to the allocation of transplants (Childress, 2001, p. 5). UNOS (United Network for Organ Sharing) is an allocation system, what it does is organize the organs according to the region from which the donations come before being offered to external regions. The focus is on award criteria that can be ethically defensible. Bodies are argued to be a national community resource, as incidents involve geography and are “morally irrelevant” (DeVita, Aulisio, & May, 2001, p. 1). Many people are aware that each patient's circumstances are considered individually. Non-maleficence No unforeseen harm should be done to donors, patients or anyone else who may be involved in the operation. transplant process. There should be no intentional or malicious harm. If a patient was unknowingly or knowingly put in danger during the transplant, this principle has been violated. Childress (2001) states that it is difficult to define the nature of harm, as there are different types of harm. For example, if a healthcare worker performs a transplant and pain is inflicted on that patient in an attempt to prevent death, then that healthcare worker has caused harm to avoid even greater harm (p.4). Conclusion Ethical healthcare issues are inevitable as long as we have healthcare organizations and healthcare professionals. Transplant assignment