Faith And Ethics In Health And Social Care

This textbook looks at how different world faiths approach ethics in health and social care, and how their faith informs their practice. Equipping practitioners with the information the need, it will support them to be more reflective regarding spirituality, ethics and their provision of care.

Discover the spiritual community's position on bioethics issues! Bioethics from a Faith Perspective: Ethics in Health Care for the Twenty-First Century offers a meaningful, rational, faith-oriented framework for deciding how to deal with important biomedical health care issues. Organ donation, managed care, the Human Genome Project, and medical technology that keeps people alive beyond their “natural” life span are some of the topics it illuminates through case analysis and resolution. Since almost all textbooks in bioethics omit the religious dimension of life (even though the field was inspired and stimulated by religious scholars at Princeton and Yale), this is an indispensable volume. While most people state their moral positions from the background of their religious traditions, many have not had the opportunity to study the relation between their faith perspectives and the difficult issues that arise in the pursuit of health care. This book shows the relevance, significance, and guidance that a faith perspective can offer for dealing with bioethical issues. This unique and thoughtful book: shows you how to distinguish and describe the relation between technical and ethical aspects of health-related issues provides you with a framework of moral principles, theories, values, and faith viewpoints teaches you the defining characteristics of a moral professional-client relationship related to faith helps you to discern when medical ethics and faith commitments are therapeutic and when they are not gives examples describing a moral problem, a faith perspective, and a justified position on that problem Since bioethics has been an amazing story of growth from the 1950s to the present day and is still expanding, there will be changes. Bioethics from a Faith Perspective stimulates that expansion by including the religious dimension. It is the perfect supplement to the existing literature on the subject.

The textbook emphasizes the Catholic tradition in health care ethics without separating it from the broader Christian tradition. The third edition incorporates issues that have arisen since the 1994 second, and is somewhat differently arranged. Appended are the 2001 Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Facilities and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Health Care Ethics is a comprehensive study of significant issues affecting health care and the ethics of health care from the perspective of Catholic theology. It aims to help Christian, and especially Catholic, health care professionals solve concrete problems in terms of principles rooted in scripture and tested by individual experience; however, its basis in real medical experience makes this book a valuable resource for anyone with a general interest in health care ethics. This fifth edition, which includes important contributions by Jean deBlois, C.S.J., considers everyday ethical questions and dilemmas in clinical care and deals more deeply with issues of women's health, mental health, sexual orientation, artificial reproduction, and the new social issues in health care. The authors devote special attention to the various ethical theories currently in use in the United States while clearly presenting a method of ethical decision making based in the Catholic tradition. They discuss the needs of the human person, outlining what it means to be human, both as an individual and as part of a community. This volume has been significantly updated to include new discussions of recent clinical innovations and theoretical issues that have arisen in the field: • the Human Genome Project• efforts to control sexual selection of infants• efforts to genetically modify the human genotype and phenotype• the development of palliative care as a medical specialty• the acceptance of non-heart beating persons as organ donors• embryo development and stem cell research• reconstructive and cosmetic surgery• nutrition and obesity• medical mistakes• the negative effects of managed care on the patient-physician relationship• recent papal allocution regarding care of patients in a persistent vegetative state and palliative care for dying patients

This fourth edition of Health Care Ethics provides a contemporary study of broad and major issues affecting health care and the ethics of health care from the perspective of Catholic teachings and theological investigation. It aims to help Christian, and especially Catholic, health care professionals solve concrete problems in terms of principles rooted in Scripture and tested by individual experience. Since the last edition of Health Care Ethics, there have been many changes in the fields of health care medicine and theology that have necessitated a fourth edition. Ashley and O'Rourke have revised their seminal work to address the publication of significant documents by the Church and the restructuring of the health care system. Features of the revised fourth edition: - Discusses significant Church documents issued since the third edition includes "The Splendor of Truth" (Veritatis Splendor), and the "Gospel of Life" (Evangelium Vitae); the "Instruction on the Vocation of Theologians"; the Catechism of the Catholic Church; and the Revised Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Services. - Examines the implications of managed care techniques. - Probes such changes in the practice of medicine as the new emphasis on preventive care, the involvement of individuals in their own care, greater use of pharmaceuticals in psychiatry, and the greater role of genetics in diagnosis and prognosis. - Explores the quest for more compassionate care of the dying. - Updates the bibliography.

What, exactly, does it mean to be human? It is an age-old question, one for which theology, philosophy, science, and medicine have all provided different answers. But though a unified response to the question can no longer be taken for granted, how we answer it frames the wide range of different norms, principles, values, and intuitions that characterize today's bioethical discussions. If we don't know what it means to be human, how can we judge whether biomedical sciences threaten or enhance our humanity? This fundamental question, however, receives little attention in the study of bioethics. In a field consumed with the promises and perils of new medical discoveries, emerging technologies, and unprecedented social change, current conversations about bioethics focus primarily on questions of harm and benefit, patient autonomy, and equality of health care distribution. Prevailing models of medical ethics emphasize human capacity for self-control and self-determination, rarely considering such inescapable dimensions of the human condition as disability, loss, and suffering, community and dignity, all of which make it difficult for us to be truly independent. In Health and Human Flourishing, contributors from a wide range of disciplines mine the intersection of the secular and the religious, the medical and the moral, to unearth the ethical and clinical implications of these facets of human existence. Their aim is a richer bioethics, one that takes into account the roles of vulnerability, dignity, integrity, and relationality in human affliction as well as human thriving. Including an examination of how a theological anthropology—a theological understanding of what it means to be a human being—can help us better understand health care, social policy, and science, this thought-provoking anthology will inspire much-needed conversation among philosophers, theologians, and health care professionals.

Based on the principle of 'medicine of the person', an attitude that embeds personal relationships and ethics in medical practice, this text considers the ideas of Paul Tournier, an influential figure whose thinking has had a substantial impact on the spiritual and psychosocial aspects of routine patient care.

Christian health care professionals in our secular and pluralistic society often face uncertainty about the place religious faith holds in today's medical practice. Through an examination of a virtue-based ethics, this book proposes a theological view of medical ethics that helps the Christian physician reconcile faith, reason, and professional duty. Edmund D. Pellegrino and David C. Thomasma trace the history of virtue in moral thought, and they examine current debate about a virtue ethic's place in contemporary bioethics. Their proposal balances theological ethics, based on the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, with contemporary medical ethics, based on the principles of beneficence, justice, and autonomy. The result is a theory of clinical ethics that centers on the virtue of charity and is manifest in practical moral decisions. Using Christian bioethical principles, the authors address today's divisive issues in medicine. For health care providers and all those involved in the fields of ethics and religion, this volume shows how faith and reason can combine to create the best possible healing relationship between health care professional and patient.