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With the advent of hospitalists, credentialing and privileging for medical staff members who no longer care for inpatients is a growing challenge for many organizations.
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Hospitals are making numerous changes in an attempt to improve the quality and safety of patient care services. These interventions could be a new program, practice, or initiatives such as staff training.
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For various reasons pain, fear, or control patients sometimes consider ending their lives; occasionally, they even ask their doctors for help. But ethicists say, before responding to the question as asked, physicians first should look at what might be going on behind the question.
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Some researchers in the UK have renewed debate over the limits placed on medical research by ethics regulations, saying ethical red tape is "stifling" advances in medicine. But ethicists in the United States say the argument is nothing new and that the review process for clinical trials protects both human subjects and research.
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The push to make hospital infection rates more transparent is, on its face, an institutional and a patient safety issue. But there also is an ethics component, experts say, and health care has a duty to inform the public on hospital-acquired infections and to put that information in perspective so that it is not misleading.
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One of your patients is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer and is struggling with severe nausea. She tells you she wants to add acupuncture to her regimen of care; you have never been convinced that acupuncture provides benefits. What is your duty to the patient?
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Given enough experience and patience, a physician can become adept at dealing with patients who they find noncompliant or overly demanding. But how does a clinician deal with a patient he or she finds utterly intolerable to be around someone who is abusive, insulting, or completely unlikable?
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Think broadly when it comes to preparedness. Even if H5N1 avian influenza never becomes a wide-spread threat to humans, you still need to plan for a pandemic, public health experts say.
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Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey (BCBSNJ), headquartered in Newark, in collaboration with The Leapfrog Group, in Washington, DC, has launched the Horizon BCBSNJ Hospital Recognition Program, offering New Jersey hospitals financial and public recognition for high-quality and effective hospital care.