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A woman suffering from personal problems and the subsequent unexpected death of her son was involuntarily committed to a behavioral health center by a psychologist allegedly following a telephone conference in which the woman expressed suicidal ideation. The physician failed to document the specifics of the conversation on the records required for an involuntary commitment.
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Hospital ethics boards now can refer to national guidelines when developing procedural standards and processes for evaluating quality of ethics consultations (EC) and institutional EC processes.
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Hospital ethics committees sometimes are called to handle cases involving donation after cardiac death (DCD), but handling these cases can be a challenge, an expert says.
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Hospitals might improve their ethics consultation processes if they design and use a brief ethics family assessment tool to determine families' and patients' values, two ethicists say.
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Hospital ethics boards seeking a solution for efficiently and effectively documenting and assessing ethics consultation work could find a best practice in the ethics consultation web (ECWeb) program developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in Washington, DC, experts say.
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President Obama's administration reversed its decision to revise a Medicare regulation to include paying physicians to discuss good advance care planning with patients.
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Hospital ethics committees could clarify and improve the way they handle issues involving life support in the intensive care unit (ICU) if they brought more nuance to any definition of the word "futile," an expert says.
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The Joint Commission can start accrediting psychiatric hospitals, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced in late February 2011.
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Increasing data show that variations in care have a negative impact on outcomes and costs some estimates are that almost a third of healthcare dollars are spent in a wasteful manner or go to overuse of the system.
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Most people have trouble planning the next week's dinners or their next vacation, let alone something that is two and a half years away.
