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Flagler Hospital - St. Augustine on Florida's east coast may offer practices or lessons for other mid-size to smaller community hospitals.
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A registry that serves as a collection point for Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment known as POLST forms has collected forms from about 18,000 people in Oregon since the registry went live Dec. 3, 2009, according to Susan Tolle, MD, director of the Center for Ethics in Health Care at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, OR, and who leads registry educational efforts.
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A study of the roles and responsibilities of patients and their proxies has implications today for hospital ethics committees and associated consult services, particularly with regard to the weight given to the voice of the proxy, according to "Contracts, Covenants and Advance Care Planning: An Empirical Study of the Moral Obligations of Patient and Proxy."
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Online social networking sites have fans ranging from the very young to the very old. Some physicians, including psychiatrists, are not immune to a curious peek into the lives of their patients or at least what they can find online but is that a line that should be crossed in the physician-patient relationship?
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The Nuffield Council on Bioethics in London has set up what that organization terms a working party to study the issue of whether the UK can ethically increase organ or tissue donation by offering incentives.
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The Occupational Safety and Health Administration's request for information (RFI) for possible regulatory action on infectious disease risk to health care workers includes the following key points:
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Editor's note: In this issue we conclude our two-part series on the national epidemic of Clostridium difficile (C. diff) with a look at current issues and controversies surrounding testing, discontinuing isolation and environmental cleaning.
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It sometimes seems, to paraphrase Mark Twain, that everybody talks about infection prevention but nobody does anything about it. Well, give the glory to the environmental services team at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Rochester, MN. Talk about a hands-on intervention.
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Community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) infections are becoming more prevalent in certain populations, particularly the HIV infected and intravenous drug users, researchers are finding.
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When staff at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) began working on reducing ventilator-associated pneumonia rates, they armed themselves with more than a bundle. The work was informed by the theory of high reliability how to make progress and how to sustain improvements.
