Ghost Surgery Position Paper Assignment Guide

This is a position paper, and the format instruction is doing more work than it appears to. You read a scenario and *present a position on that issue* — which means the paper must contain a claim someone could disagree with, defended. A balanced survey of the arguments around ghost surgery, however well informed, has not done what was asked. Decide your position before drafting, state it in the opening paragraph, and let the six hundred words defend it. That structural discipline is what separates a position paper from an essay on the same topic, and it is the easiest thing in this assignment to get wrong. The brief's instruction to consider all views does not contradict this — it tells you to engage the opposing arguments, which is a requirement of a good position paper rather than a licence to withhold your own view. Engage them and then say why you are unpersuaded.

Get the definition precise, because the brief's own framing is broader than the phrase suggests and the breadth is where the interesting argument lives. Ghost surgery is any medical procedure in which the contracting physician was not the one who performed it, and the brief extends it explicitly beyond surgery to radiology and routine lab work. That extension matters: almost nobody defends an unconsented substitution in the operating theatre, but a great deal of modern medicine is delivered by people the patient never contracted with, and the paper that engages the boundary is more interesting than the paper that condemns the clear case. The unconscious patient is the feature that makes the practice possible at scale, and it is worth naming: this is a wrong the person it is done to cannot detect at the time and frequently never learns of, which changes what any remedy has to look like.

The brief supplies the strongest counter-argument itself and it should be met rather than avoided: in some instances ghost surgery is a necessary component of the medical system, because surgeons must be trained. Any position that ignores the teaching hospital problem is weaker for it. The distinction available to you is between substitution and graduated participation under supervision, and between undisclosed and disclosed. A resident operating under supervision after the patient has consented to a teaching environment is a different act from a colleague taking over a case the patient believed their own surgeon would perform. Disclosure is doing the work in both directions here, which is worth saying explicitly: a teaching hospital that tells patients what a resident's role will be has met the objection, and one that does not has not, regardless of how good the supervision is.

Consent is the concept doing the real work and it is worth stating why. The wrong in unconsented substitution is not that the substitute is less skilled — they may be more so — but that consent was given to a particular person and the procedure performed by another. That framing has consequences the paper can use: it explains why the outcome being good does not cure the wrong, why some jurisdictions have treated it as battery rather than negligence, and why disclosure rather than skill is the remedy. Building the argument on consent rather than on competence is what gives the position a defensible foundation. It also tells you what the paper should recommend, since a consent problem has a consent remedy — specific disclosure of who will perform which parts, obtained before the patient is unconscious rather than in a pre-operative signature.

The two named cases have to be discussed and each addresses a different aspect, which the brief says explicitly. Read them rather than a summary. Tunkl concerns an exculpatory agreement — a hospital requiring a patient to release it from liability as a condition of admission — and whether such a waiver is enforceable when a service affects the public interest. Shorter concerns the boundary between negligence and an intentional wrong where consent is exceeded or absent. Together they give you the two halves the brief names: what a patient can validly agree to in advance, and what category of wrong is committed when they did not agree at all. Say which of the two matters more for your position and why, since a paper that gives them equal weight has usually not decided which question its own argument turns on.

Sourcing is prescribed unusually precisely and each requirement is separately checkable: a minimum of three sources, one of which must be from the text, one an internet source with a hyperlink, and the third from any source at all, with APA citation throughout. That third slot is the widest the assignment gets — it explicitly admits personal experience and learned treatises — so if you have relevant clinical or administrative experience, this is where it belongs, cited rather than smuggled in as an unattributed claim. Include the hyperlink itself, since the brief asks for it in terms. Note that the third slot's breadth is not an invitation to be casual: personal experience cited in APA has a format, and using it correctly is part of what the requirement is testing.

For a six-hundred-word minimum, structure matters more than breadth. A workable shape is: position stated, the practice defined including the extension beyond surgery, the teaching counter-argument met, the consent argument developed with the two cases, and a conclusion saying what should follow. Resist the temptation to cover disclosure policy, informed consent doctrine and professional discipline in equal depth — the paper has room to make one argument well, and a position paper is assessed on the argument rather than on coverage. If you find yourself needing more than six hundred words, the section to cut is the definition, since the marker knows what ghost surgery is and the argument is what they are reading for. Six hundred words is a minimum rather than a target, so the constraint is really the argument's own length: say what you have to say and stop, since padding a position paper dilutes exactly the thing it is assessed on.

This is the third of four short papers in the module, which is worth two considerations. The papers presumably build a track record of how you argue, so a position inconsistent with one you took earlier is worth acknowledging and explaining rather than leaving for the marker to notice. And the recurring format means the mechanics — three sources of the specified kinds, APA, the word minimum — are known quantities by now and are the cheapest marks in the assignment to secure before you start writing. It is also worth reading the scenario once more before submitting, because a position paper that answers a slightly different question than the one posed is the failure this format is most prone to. Keep a note of which sources you used in each of the four papers as well, since reusing the same text citation across all of them is defensible but reusing the same internet source is harder to justify.