Medical Ethics Advisor
RSSArticles
-
‘We Want Everything Possible Done for Mom’
Joanne Lynn, MD, a Washington, DC-based geriatrician and director of the Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness at Altarum Institute, has dedicated her career to finding ways to improve health and healthcare at a sustainable cost. Lynn tells Medical Ethics Advisor how hospitals can achieve ethical end-of-life care.
-
New Resuscitation Policy: It’s Not Offered Unless Clinically Indicated
Ethicists at University of Virginia helped develop a new resuscitation policy stating that patients or surrogates can accept or refuse offered treatment, and that the healthcare team should not offer treatments unless clinically indicated.
-
Patients Who Refuse Discharge Are ‘Disaster in the Making’
Patients refusing to leave the hospital for weeks, or even months — despite being medically cleared for discharge — are a growing problem, according to ethicists.
-
Impossible-to-comprehend Forms ‘Make a Sham of Informed Consent’
Long sentences, large paragraphs, technical language, and multisyllabic words all contribute to reading and comprehension difficulties for informed consent forms, found a recent study.
-
Very Few Patients Address ICDs in Advance Care Planning
Some clinicians and patients view deactivation of implantable cardiac devices as morally different from the withdrawal of other life-sustaining interventions, yet very few people address this in advance care planning.
-
Are Hospital Billing Practices Unethical? Chargemaster Still Used To Boost Revenue
U.S. hospitals still are using chargemaster markups to maximize revenues, found a recent study.
-
New Report on Research Integrity: Institutions Also Play a Role
Institutions and environments — not only individual researchers — play an important role in supporting scientific integrity, stresses a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
-
Study: Research on Dying ICU Patients Is Ethically Feasible
Research on critically ill, dying ICU patients is ethically feasible, found a recent study which achieved a 95% consent rate for approached families.
-
Study Sheds Light on Surrogates’ Decision-making
It comes as no surprise to anyone with experience caring for patients at the end of life that family members often have difficulty predicting a patient’s desire for life-sustaining treatments. Reasons for this are less well-understood, however.
-
It’s Not Just MDs: Patient Advocacy Organizations Have Industry Ties, Too
Recent studies have revealed surprising financial ties of patient advocacy organizations: the vast majority receive financial support from drug, device, and biotechnology companies.