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Many hospitals have adopted more generous charity-care guidelines for uninsured patients after a barrage of publicity about aggressive hospital billing and collection practices and a spate of lawsuits alleging hospitals overcharged uninsured patients, according to a health care policy expert.
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For many patients dying of cancer, home is where they want to spend the last weeks of their lives. Their caregivers often spouses, life partners or children may be willing to give whatever care their loved one needs, but can find themselves overwhelmed, unsure, and at risk for depression and other health problems themselves.
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When hiring new physicians, health care practices might want to look beyond grade transcripts, according to a medical school professor in California who has determined that medical students who were disciplined in school for irresponsible attendance or patient care are nearly nine times more likely to be disciplined by their medical boards when they become practicing physicians.
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The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) plans to revise the sexual boundaries policy used by state medical boards in determining sexual boundary violations by physicians.
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The Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has begun an 18-month project to examine the field of vaccine development and use and to propose an ethical framework to help guide researchers, pharmaceutical companies, public health agencies, health care providers, and citizens regarding vaccines and their safe, effective, and ethical use.
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Ensuring that medical research is conducted ethically, objectively, and with the trust of the public is getting more difficult, even as the urgency for new research in pharmaceuticals and procedures increases.
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A snow storm would likely draw in just about anyone who could make it to the hospital, but in an infectious disease outbreak such as SARS, about half of a health care institutions employees might be unwilling to work, according to a study published in the Journal of Urban Health.
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A video on the art of disclosing medical errors, created by an ethicist at Emory University in Atlanta, is being made available for free on-line viewing.
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When the topic of medical ethics comes up in conversation or literature, it usually refers to the ethics of providing direct patient care. But the ethics of hospital trustees have a profound influence on the delivery of care and the overall health of nonprofit hospitals, and yet there has been very little examination of the ethics of trusteeship.
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Early medical researchers were an ethical bunch, possibly because they had little choice. Many conducted experiments and tests on themselves (including one who snaked a catheter through his arm and into his heart, then climbed two flights of stairs to take an X-ray to prove a person could survive cardiac catheterization), because the researchers couldnt bring themselves to do untested procedures on others.
