Where We Stand
Section: Professional Standards
Policy: Patient-Physician Covenant

Patient-Physician Covenant

OMA believes that medicine is, at its center, a moral enterprise grounded in a covenant of trust.  This covenant obliges physicians to be competent and to use their competence in the patient’s best interests.  Physicians, therefore, are both intellectually and morally obliged to act as advocates for the sick wherever their welfare is threatened and for their health at all times.

Today, this covenant of trust is significantly threatened.  From within, there is growing legitimization of the physician’s materialistic self-interest, externally, for-profit forces press the physician into the role of commercial agent to enhance the profitability of health care organizations.  Such distortions of the physician’s responsibility degrade the physician-patient relationship that is the central element and structure of clinical care.  To capitulate to these alterations of the trust relationship is to significantly alter the physician’s role as healer, caregiver, helper and advocate for the sick and for the health of all.

By its tradition and very nature, medicine is a special kind of human activity — one that cannot be pursued effectively without the virtues of humility, honesty, intellectual integrity, compassion, and effacement of excessive self-interest.  These traits mark physicians as members of a moral community dedicated to something other than its own self-interest.

Our first obligation must be to serve the good of those persons who seek our help and trust us to provide it.  Physicians, as physicians, are not and must never be commercial entrepreneurs, gate closers or agents to fiscal policy that runs counter to our trust.  Any defection from the primacy of the patient’s wellbeing places the patient at risk by treatment that may compromise quality of or access to medical care.