BACKGROUND Setting priorities and the subsequent allocation of resources is a major ethical issue facing healthcare facilities, including the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), the largest integrated healthcare delivery network in the United States. Yet despite the importance of priority setting and its impact on those who receive and those who provide care, we know relatively little about h...

Conceived as a solution to clinical dilemmas, and now required by organizations for hospital accreditation, ethics committees have been subject only to small-scale studies. The wide use of ethics committees and the diverse roles they have played compel study. In 1999 the University of Pennsylvania Ethics Committee Research Group (ECRG) completed the first national survey of the presence, compos...

Trust is frequently discussed with reference to the professional-patient relationship. However, trust is less explored in relation to the ways in which understanding of, and responses to, questions of ethics are discussed by both the "public" and "experts." Public engagement activity in healthcare ethics may invoke "trust" in analysing a moral question or problem but less frequently conceives o...

INTRODUCTION Ethics and values are increasingly significant aspects of patient-centred healthcare. While it is widely agreed that ethics and values are essential for healthcare delivery, there is also an acknowledgement that these are areas that are challenging to teach. The purpose of this study is to report a small-scale evaluative research project of a web-based technology with the education...

INTRODUCTION Suicide prevention in psychiatric care is arguably complex and incompletely understood as a patient safety issue. A resilient healthcare approach provides perspectives through which to understand this complexity by understanding everyday clinical practice. By including suicidal patients and healthcare professionals as sources of knowledge, a deeper understanding of what constitutes...

In hospitals, ethics consultations and committees were a product of the 1970s in the United States of America (US). The US administration encouraged their development particularly when the influential 1983 report of the President’s Commission for the study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, entitled Deciding to Forgo Life-Sustaining Treatment, gave a signifi...

Cook, A., H. Hoas, and K. Guttmannova. 2005. From here to there: Lessons from an integrative patient safety project in rural healthcare settings. In Advances in patient safety: From research to implementation, 318–390. ed. K. Henriksen, J. B. Battles, E. Marks, and D. I. Lewin. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Nelson, W., G. Lushkov, A. Pomerantz, and W. B. Weeks. 2006...

PURPOSE The recent introduction of master's level curricula for Occupational Therapy (OT) and Physiotherapy (PT) training programs in Canada raises both challenges and opportunities to address ethical issues during professional training. This study evaluated the inclusion of ethics content in course descriptions and course calendars in order to develop a preliminary understanding of how rehabil...