This is a reflective account of an ethical dilemma encountered while on placement on a cardiology ward. Reflection is a process which allows practitioners to reveal and expose thoughts, behaviours and feelings that are present at a particular time. All reflective models are based on the principle that purposeful reflection results in a better understanding and awareness, thus enhancing clinical...

The ideas of textual or data mining (TDM) and subsequent analysis go back hundreds if not thousands of years. Originally carried out manually, textual and data analysis has long been a tool which has enabled new insights to be drawn from text corpora. However, for the potential benefits of TDM to be unlocked, a number of non-technological barriers need to be overcome. These include legal uncert...

Hep-Net is a German medical research and health care network dedicated to viral hepatitis. Its many activities include basic and clinical research, training and public awareness, and rely on modern information technology and the Internet. One major component is a central registry for medical data, serum and tissue samples. In order to build this registry, important legal and technological issue...

Physician training programs in undergraduate and graduate medical education strongly recommend that their trainees gain experience in helping patients and their families address end-of-life and palliative care issues with knowledge and compassion. Currently these training programs are inadequately meeting this goal. This paper describes a creative 1-day training workshop or several half-day sem...

The ophthalmologists together with all other health care providers are today under greater scrutiny than before as the public we serve is more literate, more educated and has easy access to infinite online information. In other words, the public is more aware of possible medical negligence. The days are gone when the doctor was considered next to the Supreme Being. In spite of super specializat...

This paper discusses the problems associated with the refurbishing and re-use of medical devices which are sold by manufacturers as 'single use items' by focusing in particular on the re-use of pacemakers. Re-use of single-use devices such as pacemakers does occur in Australia, and in many other parts of the world, but there has been little public awareness of this fact. The paper explains and ...

Physicians responsible for the long term management of patients in the persistent vegetative state face several problems. These include deciding whether tube feeding is treatment or nutritional care, whether withdrawal of tube feeding is an appropriate form of management, what clinical advantage there is in active treatment; at what level of awareness can a patient be said to have a quality of ...

There is a growing awareness that the national judge plays a vital role in the European legal system, as is illustrated by the emergence of various initiatives for the cross-border access of national (EU-related) case law. Because these and various national systems all use their own identifiers, findability and citability are seriously hampered. This paper assesses current developments and trie...

The EU Intelligence Analysis Centre (INTCEN) is the most recent name for an institution that has existed in a number of forms since 1999. It monitors events both inside and outside the EU in order to provide “intelligence analyses, early warning and situational awareness” to EU institutions and Member States in the fields of security, defence and counter-terrorism. While it remains relatively s...