Treating threats: the ethical dilemmas of treating threatening patients

This paper considers the impact of threats on professional service workers, especially as these emerge in healthcare services. Based on interviews with healthcare professionals and prison guards, this paper discusses the ethical dilemmas inherent in viewing the doctor--patient relationship from a solely rule-based ethical approach when threatening behaviour is involved. It is argued that under threatening circumstances, a service worker will not be able to exclude personal moral beliefs from the decision-making process. Consequently, the tradition of relying on rule-based ethics is insufficient on its own and must be supplemented with a repersonalised ethics of ‘the Other’.