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Vermont, Oregon, Washington, and Montana now allow physicians to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill patients who meet certain criteria and request lethal prescriptions.
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Clinical ethicists typically play an advisory role, and their recommendations arent always accepted or followed by the clinical team.
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Patient autonomy and parental rights are two primary ethical concerns involving access to emergency contraception, which was recently approved with over-the-counter status without age restriction.
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Though the value of infection prevention programs goes without saying today, there was a time when the field was first forming that there was little to no evidence that the basic tenets of infection prevention were essential to protect hospital patients and prevent what were then called nosocomial infections.
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The future of infection prevention hinges in large part on greater public awareness of the vital role IPs play in protecting patients throughout the health care system, an acknowledgement that is needed to preserve and expand program resources, said Patti Grant, RN, BSN, MS, CIC, president of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).
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The newly accredited MaGil IRB in Rockville, MD, has review process timelines that might seem impossible to other organizations, including a self-imposed deadline of four hours from the time an IRB review submission is made to the time it is seen by IRB members.
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For IRBs at mid-sized institutions, monthly meetings can go for hours and involve many protocols. This can be very time-consuming and cumbersome for IRB members and investigators alike. Protocol discussions may not get the time they need, and members simply may not have enough time to review all the agenda items.
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Human research protection offices have found that adopting policies and procedures regarding the reporting of unanticipated problems (UPs) has helped to reduce IRB busywork and improve the research communitys understanding of when to report problems, experts say.
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The IRB office at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City takes its standard operating procedures (SOPs) very seriously. The IRB even dedicates one highly experienced, part-time professional to make frequent revisions and improvements to the SOPs and guidance.
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The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) recently updated its guidance on reporting unanticipated problems (UPs), adverse events (AEs), and other incidents in human subject research, providing a model for IRBs.
