Rethinking Rural Health Ethics

This book challenges readers to rethink rural health ethics. Traditional approaches to health ethics are often urban-centric, making implicit assumptions about how values and norms apply in health care practice, and as such may fail to take into account the complexity, depth, richness, and diversity of the rural context. There are ethically relevant differences between rural health practice and rural health services delivery and urban practice and delivery that go beyond the stereotypes associated with rural life and rural health services. This book examines key values in the rural context that have not been fully explored or taken into account when we examine health ethics issues, including the values of community and place, and a need to “revalue” relationships. It also advocates for a greater attention to meso and macro level analysis in rural health ethics as being critical to ethical analysis of rural health care. This book is essential reading for those involved in health ethics, rural health policy and governance, and for rural health providers.

Klugman and Dalinis initiate a much-needed conversation about the ethical and policy concerns facing health care providers in the rural United States. This volume initiates a much-needed conversation about the ethical and policy concerns facing health care providers in the rural United States. Although 21 percent of the population lives in rural areas, only 11 percent of physicians practice there. What challenges do health care workers face in remote locations? What are the differences between rural and urban health care practices? What particular ethical issues arise in treating residents of small communities? Craig M. Klugman and Pamela M. Dalinis gather philosophers, lawyers, physicians, nurses, and researchers to discuss these and other questions, offering a multidisciplinary overview of rural health care in the United States. Rural practitioners often practice within small, tight-knit communities, socializing with their patients outside the examination room. The residents are more likely to have limited finances and to lack health insurance. Physicians may have insufficient resources to treat their patients, who often have to travel great distances to see a doctor. The first part of the book analyzes the differences between rural and urban cultures and discusses the difficulties in treating patients in rural settings. The second part features the personal narratives of rural health care providers, who share their experiences and insights. The last part introduces unique ethical challenges facing rural health care providers and proposes innovative solutions to those problems. This volume is a useful resource for bioethicists, members of rural bioethics committees and networks, policy makers, teachers of health care providers, and rural practitioners themselves.

A comprehensive guide to the unique nature of rural health care ethics

The History and Bioethics of Medical Education: "You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught" continues the Routledge Advances in the History of Bioethics series by exploring approaches to the teaching of bioethics from disparate disciplines, geographies, and contexts. Van Rensselaer Potter coined the phrase "Global Bioethics" to define human relationships with their contexts. This and subsequent volumes return to Potter’s founding vision from historical perspectives and asks, how did we get here from then? The patient-practitioner relationship has come to the fore in bioethics; this volume asks: is there an ideal bioethical curriculum? Are the students being carefully taught and, in turn, are they carefully learning? This volume will appeal to those working in both clinical medicine and the medical humanities, as vibrant connections are drawn between various ways of knowing.

Numerous issues confront women's healthcare today, among them the medicalization of women's bodies, cosmetic genital surgery, violence against women, HIV, perinatal mental health disorders. This volume uniquely explores such difficult topics and others at the intersection of clinical practice, policy, and bioethics in women's health care through a feminist ethics lens. With in-depth discussions of issues in women's reproductive health, it also broadens scholarship by responding to a wider array of ethical challenges that many women experience in accessing health care. Contributions touch on many themes previously tackled by feminist ethics, but in new, contemporary ways. Some chapters expand into new fields in the bioethics literature, such as the ethical issues related to the care of Indigenous women, uninsured refugees and immigrants, women engaged in sex work, and those with HIV at different life stages and perinatal mental health disorders. Authors seek to connect theory and practice with users of the health system by including women's voices in their research. Bringing to bear their experience in active clinical practice in medicine, nursing, and ethics, the authors contemplate new conceptual approaches to important issues in women's healthcare, and make ethical practice recommendations for those grappling with these issues. Topical and up-to-date, this book provides a valuable resource for physicians, nurses, clinical ethicists, and researchers working in some of the most critical areas of women's health and applied ethics today.

Understanding ethics and law in health care is an essential part of nurse and midwife professional standards, and a core component of qualifying programmes. Ethics, Law and Health Care teaches applied ethics and law in a way that illustrates the real world applications of these essential aspects of practice. It enables readers to not only recognise but also address legal and ethical issues that will arise in their professional practice. The book approaches these issues using the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Codes of Ethics, the Codes of Professional Conduct and the four principles of biomedical ethics: - Autonomy - Non-maleficence - Beneficence - Justice. Filled with case studies, review questions and useful further reading, this book gives readers a solid understanding of ethics and law in health care, and a clear decision-making framework so they can take action confidently. Please note, this book is written specifically for the Australian market. New to this Edition: - A new chapter on health, law, ethics and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders - Illustrated with 'real world' applications, the bookensures students understand how core components of the nursing and midwifery curriculum are put in to practice - Copies of the Codes of Ethics and Professional Conduct for Nurses and Midwives are provided as appendixes for ease of reference

​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.

In bringing together research from a wide range of continental European countries as well as the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, the contributors to this text highlight different areas of governance, as well as the various players involved in the policy process.