Practical Decision Making In Health Care Ethics

For nearly fifteen years Practical Decision Making in Health Care Ethics has offered scholars and students a highly accessible and teachable alternative to the dominant principle-based theories in the field. Devettere’s approach is not based on an ethics of abstract obligations and duties, but, following Aristotle, on how to live a fulfilled and happy life—in short, an ethics of personal well-being grounded in prudence, the virtue of ethical decision making. This third edition is revised and updated and includes discussions of several landmark cases, including the tragic stories of Terri Schiavo and Jesse Gelsinger (the first death caused by genetic research). Devettere addresses new topics such as partial-birth abortion law, embryonic stem cell research, infant euthanasia in The Netherlands, recent Vatican statements on feeding tubes, organ donation after cardiac death, new developments in artificial hearts, clinical trials developed by pharmaceutical companies to market new drugs, ghostwritten scientific articles published in major medical journals, and controversial HIV/AIDS research in Africa. This edition also includes a new chapter on the latest social and political issues in American health care. Devettere’s engaging text relies on commonsense moral concepts and avoids academic jargon. It includes a glossary of legal, medical, and ethical terms; an index of cases; and thoroughly updated bibliographic essays at the end of each chapter that offer resources for further reading. It is a true classic, brilliantly conceived and executed, and is now even more valuable to undergraduates and graduate students, medical students, health care professionals, hospital ethics committees and institutional review boards, and general readers interested in philosophy, medicine, and the rapidly changing field of health care ethics.

For more than 20 years, this title has provided scholars and students a highly accessible and teachable alternative to the dominant principle-based theories in the field. Raymond J. Devettere's approach is not based on an ethics of abstract obligations and duties but, following Aristotle, on how to live a fulfilled and happy life - in short, an ethics of personal well-being grounded in prudence, the virtue of ethical decision making.

"Both a thorough resource & an ideal course book on medical ethics...deeply philosophical & eminently pragmatic."-Choice.

"Both a thorough resource & an ideal course book on medical ethics...deeply philosophical & eminently pragmatic."-Choice.

Drawing from clinical experience, philosophy, psychology, and current health law and policy, Biomedical Ethics and Decision-Making is a detailed survey of persistent issues in health care ethics, emphasizing the complexities and nuances of practical decision-making and yielding a multifaceted and systematic approach to solving problems. As a useful resource for both students and clinicians, it includes references for further exploration of ethical issues as well as provocative questions for discussion in classroom and clinical settings. As a textbook, it stands alongside such standard works as Beauchamp's and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics; DeGrazia's, Mappes's, and Ballard's Biomedical Ethics; Munson's Intervention and Reflection; and Vaughn's Bioethics. Besides presenting current dilemmas in health care, it reviews elements of cognitive psychology, describes common errors in critical thinking, offers techniques for evaluating and integrating evidence into ethical reasoning, assesses professionals and professionalism, invites readers to dissect philosophical analyses to bolster their critical thinking skills, and provides opportunities to engage in self-reflection on contemporary challenges in health care policy and delivery.

​The goal of this open access book is to develop an approach to clinical health care ethics that is more accessible to, and usable by, health professionals than the now-dominant approaches that focus, for example, on the application of ethical principles. The book elaborates the view that health professionals have the emotional and intellectual resources to discuss and address ethical issues in clinical health care without needing to rely on the expertise of bioethicists. The early chapters review the history of bioethics and explain how academics from outside health care came to dominate the field of health care ethics, both in professional schools and in clinical health care. The middle chapters elaborate a series of concepts, drawn from philosophy and the social sciences, that set the stage for developing a framework that builds upon the individual moral experience of health professionals, that explains the discontinuities between the demands of bioethics and the experience and perceptions of health professionals, and that enables the articulation of a full theory of clinical ethics with clinicians themselves as the foundation. Against that background, the first of three chapters on professional education presents a general framework for teaching clinical ethics; the second discusses how to integrate ethics into formal health care curricula; and the third addresses the opportunities for teaching available in clinical settings. The final chapter, "Empowering Clinicians", brings together the various dimensions of the argument and anticipates potential questions about the framework developed in earlier chapters.

Pamphlet is a succinct statement of the ethical obligations and duties of individuals who enter the nursing profession, the profession's nonnegotiable ethical standard, and an expression of nursing's own understanding of its commitment to society. Provides a framework for nurses to use in ethical analysis and decision-making.

Medical practice is an inherently ethical enterprise. More than ever before, medical practice requires that medical professionals develop and exercise high ethical standards. Health care practitioners who ignore basic concepts of medical ethics risk exposing their patients to serious harm, and open themselves and their institutions to charges of malpractice. Clinical Bioethics provides for the busy clinical professional a concise, comprehensive treatment of the basics in this complex new field.