Luppo Kuillman

Chapter 4 86 In this study, we focus on “reporting reprehensible conduct in care” as an outcome variable, exploring factors that might determine whether contemporary healthcare professionals will or will not report instances of reprehensible conduct that they might witness. We predict that the likelihood of healthcare professionals to report reprehensible conduct is determined by a combination of the extent to which they attach importance to ethics in care and their level of perceived behavioral control. We elaborate on this in the following sections. BACKGROUND Reporting Reprehensible Conduct in Care From the perspective of compliance with the principles of ethical care, it is essential for all healthcare providers to adhere to the professional responsibility of identifying and reporting reprehensible conduct, as derived from the ethical imperative of refraining from maleficent conduct. In this study, therefore, we regard “reporting reprehensible conduct in care” (RRC) as a type of whistleblowing that is specific to the healthcare context and that involves reporting the behavior of colleagues who violate the rules or exhibit morally questionable conduct. We define RRC as a concept that is reserved exclusively to the healthcare domain and as a planned behavior that is specifically applicable to the individual, autonomous healthcare provider. In our definition, RRC can include either internal or external reporting. Internal reporting focuses largely on disclosing the misconduct of colleagues or superiors to the managerial layers holding ultimate responsibility within the organization. In contrast, external reporting is aimed at disclosing such misconduct to authorities outside the organization (e.g., the health inspectorate or even the press) (Gagnon & Perron, 2019). Given our view of RRC as a healthcare-specific concept that is strongly related to the concept of whistleblowing, we also suppose that RRC may be associated with comparable consequences for healthcare professionals. More specifically, reporting reprehensible conduct can pose a serious ethical dilemma for a healthcare professional, given that such reporting is known to have consequences at both the personal level (e.g., emotional, physical health, character assassination) and the professional level (e.g., occupational, financial, legal) (Hussain & Ho, 2017).