Health Service Administration and Capital Punishment
Health Service Administration deals with management procedures in the health profession associated mainly with the overall management of health care facilities such as a hospital or nursing home (http://www.allalliedhealthschools.com /faqs/health_ services_administrator.php). It’s difficult to explain how HSA (Health Service Administration) relates to capital punishment, but nevertheless, it is important to relate how such a complicated topic as capital punishment has any relation to HSA. Suppose that you are a Health Service Administrator of a Nursing/Mental Institution home. You are in charge of deciding who is mentally ill; therefore, by diagnosing an inmate as mentally ill he or she will not be executed because of their cognitive disability. But if the inmate is cognitively able, then he or she will be executed. Recently you just received a patient (inmate) who has committed murder by stabbing his victim 15 times and he claims insanity for he was not himself when it happened. You are to evaluate this patient according to the diagnosis of the physicians in your institution, who in fact have diagnosed him as average in the IQ scale. You know that for a fact that you will have to report him and ultimately he will be executed. What would you do in such a situation? How is that going to make you feel, knowing the fact that the decision that you make of whether the inmate is mentally challenged or not, ultimately leads to the execution of the cognitively able inmate? The health service administrator is responsible for the overall quality of care for patients, what if you were the health care administrator of a state penitentiary, how would you feel over the fact that you are responsible over the care of these patients knowing the fact that they are all in death row. Does it not feel redundant or cruel to take care of the health of death row inmates? Capital punishment is a sensitive matter and there are many conditions that will affect you in your professional life.
An Opinion
The extent of how capital punishment affects my religious values is a question that merely relies on my religious faith as a Seventh - day Adventist. The 6th Commandment states “Thou shalt not kill” (NIV, Exodus 20), the Bible as a whole teaches love and peace through Jesus Christ, therefore, where does the notion or any implication of taking the life of another come from in the Bible as a teaching of Christianity. The Bible says:
“let the LORD judge the peoples. Judge me, O LORD, according to my righteousness, according to my integrity, O Most High.” (NIV, Psalm 7:8)
“God is a righteous judge, a God who expresses his wrath every day.” (NIV, Psalm 7:11)
“The LORD reigns forever; he has established his throne for judgment. He will judge the world in righteousness; he will govern the peoples with justice.” (NIV, Psalm 9:7-9)
I cannot foresee how man has taken God’s judgment into their own dispense and have judged one another in a manner that lead to hatred and death. Jesus came down from His Holy Throne and unto this wretched and sinful Earth to teach love, peace and salvation through Jesus Christ; where have we gone wrong to be lead astray into our own selfish desires. I believe that God and God alone has the authority to judge us and not man. Every time that a person is executed, they have been judged by the mere intelligence of man. We cannot take what belongs to God, and judgment belongs to God alone.
