Medical Ethics
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Ethical Research Encompasses Feedback from Community
Study investigators increasingly feel an obligation to obtain input from community members to ensure ethical research. Failing to engage respectfully and proactively with communities runs the risk of alienating people, or worse, exploiting them.
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Effective Approaches to Close Gaps in Advance Care Planning
Advance care planning (ACP) has shown promise for helping people with the experience of living with serious illness. To address implementation and access gaps, researchers have tried a multitude of different interventions to improve ACP.
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Advance Care Planning Billing Codes Are Rarely Used in Neurology
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services took an important step in 2016 by introducing billing codes for advance care planning. Researchers wanted to assess how often these codes are used in neurology.
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Educational Intervention Improves Older Latinos’ End-of-Life Care Planning
Susanny J. Beltran, PhD, MSW, and colleagues noticed that older Latinos consistently completed advance care planning documentation less frequently compared to the general population. They evaluated an educational intervention to see if it would improve advance care planning readiness and knowledge of older Latino adults.
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Ethical Considerations if AI Tools Are Used for Informed Consent
Participants in clinical trials often struggle to comprehend informed consent forms, raising questions on whether they are making truly informed decisions. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are a potential solution to this longstanding ethical concern. However, the burden is on researchers to ensure that AI-generated documents uphold ethical and regulatory standards.
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Nurses Self-Report High Levels of Moral Courage, but Few Are Willing to Act Directly
Nurses reported significant social and professional barriers to act in response to an ethical violation, a recent study found.
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Ethicists Can Explore Rationale if Physician Refuses to Continue Life-Prolonging Interventions
Many ethics consults center around a conflict between a family who wants to continue life-prolonging interventions and a physician who refuses to provide it. But does the family understand the rationale for the decision?
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Researchers Face Many Ethical Challenges with HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study
The HEALthy Brain and Child Development study is looking at the effect of various prenatal and postnatal exposures on pediatric brain and behavioral development. To answer important questions about early life influences on developmental trajectories, researchers are recruiting a large cohort of pregnant individuals. Some participants have substance use disorders.
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Policies for Vulnerable Research Participants Vary at U.S. Academic Institutions
When conducting clinical trials involving vulnerable participants, researchers are ethically and legally obligated to protect them from harm. But what policies do academic institutions have for protecting vulnerable human research subjects?
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Ethical Concerns if Surrogates Report Decisional Conflict
Surrogates face challenging decisions on life-sustaining treatments in the intensive care unit setting. Those with decisional conflict reported poor medical understanding, suboptimal support, and lack of clarity about patients’ treatment preferences.