What is beneficence in health care?

Beneficence means doing good. The idea of beneficence in medicine is thousands of years old and is central to the entire goal of health care. Health care professionals have an ethical obligation to help their patients.

In addition to doing good for individual patients, beneficence includes an obligation for health care professionals to do good for the sake of society. To illustrate this dual obligation, we can use the example of vaccines. When a health care professional administers a vaccine, the patient has an obvious individual benefit: namely, the patent will now be safe from a particular disease. But society also benefits because herd immunity (the collective immunity within a particular population of people) has also increased, thereby reducing the chances that a particular disease will make its way through that population.

Beneficence for both individual patients and society at large can take many different forms, including:

• Using CPR to resuscitate a heart attack victim

• Beginning a community outreach program to address opioid addiction

• Ensuring rails on a patient's bed are raised and secure in order to prevent falls

• Prescribing antibiotics to a child with an ear infection

• Talking to middle school students about the dangers of smoking