Medical Ethics Advisor
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Study: COPD Symptom Burden Often Goes Unrecognized
Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease often experience symptom burden and social isolation that is underappreciated by clinicians, are much more likely than lung cancer patients to die in hospital than at home, and they often lack palliative care, found a recent study.
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‘We Want Everything Possible Done for Mom’
Joanne Lynn, MD, a Washington, DC-based geriatrician and director of the Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness at Altarum Institute, has dedicated her career to finding ways to improve health and healthcare at a sustainable cost. Lynn tells Medical Ethics Advisor how hospitals can achieve ethical end-of-life care.
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New Resuscitation Policy: It’s Not Offered Unless Clinically Indicated
Ethicists at University of Virginia helped develop a new resuscitation policy stating that patients or surrogates can accept or refuse offered treatment, and that the healthcare team should not offer treatments unless clinically indicated.
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Patients Who Refuse Discharge Are ‘Disaster in the Making’
Patients refusing to leave the hospital for weeks, or even months — despite being medically cleared for discharge — are a growing problem, according to ethicists.
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Impossible-to-comprehend Forms ‘Make a Sham of Informed Consent’
Long sentences, large paragraphs, technical language, and multisyllabic words all contribute to reading and comprehension difficulties for informed consent forms, found a recent study.
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Very Few Patients Address ICDs in Advance Care Planning
Some clinicians and patients view deactivation of implantable cardiac devices as morally different from the withdrawal of other life-sustaining interventions, yet very few people address this in advance care planning.
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Are Hospital Billing Practices Unethical? Chargemaster Still Used To Boost Revenue
U.S. hospitals still are using chargemaster markups to maximize revenues, found a recent study.
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New Report on Research Integrity: Institutions Also Play a Role
Institutions and environments — not only individual researchers — play an important role in supporting scientific integrity, stresses a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
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Study: Research on Dying ICU Patients Is Ethically Feasible
Research on critically ill, dying ICU patients is ethically feasible, found a recent study which achieved a 95% consent rate for approached families.
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Study Sheds Light on Surrogates’ Decision-making
It comes as no surprise to anyone with experience caring for patients at the end of life that family members often have difficulty predicting a patient’s desire for life-sustaining treatments. Reasons for this are less well-understood, however.