Discusses the question, Are a patient's best interests ever served by the removal of artificial nutrition and hydration supports? Poses ethical and theological questions generated by the case of Nancy Cruzan and offers an outline of necessary conditions which ought to be present to make the withholding of artificially induced ...

Loewy makes an extraordinary and audacious claim. He does not only reject virtue ethics, casuistry, the "Kantian injunction of respect for persons based on their capacity for self-legislation," and the utilitarian greatest good as possible groundings for clinical ethics. He even offers another grounding that he qualifies explicitly as "universally ...

Decision making is an important component of the role of nursing administrators; yet, committee meetings for decision making have limitations. The author describes the characteristics of the Delphi technique and compares the Delphi process to the face-to-face discussions occurring in committee meetings. Specific information about the use of the Delphi ...

The formation of the new American College of Clinical Engineering (ACCE) on February 17, 1990 is a significant event in the development of the profession of clinical engineering. The issues facing the new society are substantial. ACCE founding fathers debated for nearly a year before making the decision to launch ...

Edmund Pellegrino has pioneered work in medical ethics calling for a reconstruction of Hippocratic ethics. In particular, he has spoken of incorporating principles that concern justice and the common good. This article traces his commitment to the common good, concern for the poor, opposition to libertarianism, acknowledgement of the necessity ...

Ethical reality is coextensive with human dignity. Therefore, one essential way to understand ethics is as the systematic effort to discern the imperatives of human dignity. Seeing ethics in this way highlights the fact that health care institutions have many centers of ethical responsibility (CERs) - the Chief Executive Officer, ...

Of paramount importance is the respect for autonomy and right to self-determination inherent in an ethically sound decision-making process. The President's Commission clearly summarized the prevailing view of informed consent when it stated: "ethically valid consent is a process of shared decision making based on mutual respect and participation, not ...

Ethical decision-making for the care of the critically ill and injured has never been more difficult than it is today. Major technologic advances prolong life but often provide questionable benefit in human terms. Both the ethical commitment to the individual patient and the competition for access to expensive and scarce ...

Ethical dilemmas in medical decision-making over the past ten years have assumed an unprecedented magnitude of importance. All members of the health care team--including physician assistants--have been drawn into the debate. This development has placed an obligation on PAs to develop skills of ethical analysis in order to make informed ...

Changes in technology, enabling the medical profession to prolong the life of a patient, reflect the need for the legal and ethical questions involved to be adequately addressed. The relationship that clearly exists between law and ethics is now being pressed by this new technology. Recent cases that have come ...

Drawing on the example of one specific Ethics Committee, the author delineates feminine and masculine styles of ethical decision making and work with the dying as two sides of what it means to be humanistic in patient care. The author draws particularly on the work of Carol Gilligan to differentiate ...

Decision making for incompetent elderly people is an increasingly serious issue for American society. The decision-making processes we choose will reflect choices among a number of ethical principles--those specifying the purpose of substituted judgment, those guiding the surrogate decision maker, and those used in choosing the surrogate--and depends as well ...

The ethical dimensions of availability and accessibility of hospice care to dying persons and their families are discussed. The Dying Person's Bill of Rights is used as a framework for commenting on applicable ethical principles, reimbursement patterns of the federal government, and decision-making obligations of society, institutions, caregivers, patients, and ...

When they have addressed highly controversial subjects, the bioethical commissions of the last decade have tended to avoid explaining the ethical justifications for their recommendations. This omission is consistent with the typical preference of policymakers for "muddling through," because it is often possible to reach agreement on specific decisions even ...

Executives spend about 69% of their time in meeting with at least two other people, according to a recent study out of McGill University. In spite of this, participants do not consider this to be time used wisely and, according to the respondents, the problem seems to be growing worse. ...

What does the telling of stories have to do with theology or religion or ethics? Transcending utilitarian, principlist, or situationist approaches to ethics, one may look at life as story and the way a life is lived as character. "Death is the final chapter in each life story. . . ...

This joint statement from the British Medical Association (BMA), the Resuscitation Council (UK) and the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) was published in October 2007. Decisions around cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) can raise very sensitive and potentially distressing issues for patients and people close to them. These guidelines identify key ethical ...