CONTEXT In 2004, California's Paid Family Leave Insurance Program (PFLI) became the first state program to provide paid leave to care for an ill family member. OBJECTIVE To assess awareness and use of the program by employed parents of children with special health care needs, a population likely to need leave. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Telephone interviews with successive cohorts of...

0 n 15 February of this year, shortly after the number of people Dr. Jack Kevorkian had helped to commit suicide swelled to fifteen, the Michigan legislature passed a law, effective that very day, making assisted suicide a felony punishable by up to four years in prison. The law, which is automaticallv reDealed six months after a I ‘ newly established commission on death and dying recommends pe...

When I began my career with dual training in bioethics and law, my research and clinical interests were focused on the suffering of terminally ill adults due to unwanted treatment and how perceptions of law among health care providers contributed to this problem. A central goal of my work was to try to prevent situations where physicians would aggressively continue to treat patients in ways con...

Approximately 10% of children grow up with a parent who has been diagnosed with a chronic medical condition (CMC) and seem to be at risk for adjustment difficulties. We examined differences in behavioral, psychosocial and academic outcomes between 161 adolescents from 101 families with a chronically ill parent and 112 adolescents from 68 families with healthy parents, accounting for statistical...

BACKGROUND While medical ethics place a high value on providing truthful information to patients, disclosure practices are far from being the norm in many countries. Transmitting bad news still remains a big problem that health care professionals face in their every day clinical practice. AIMS Through the review of relevant literature, an attempt to examine the trends in this issue worldwide ...

Mental disorders are associated with many difficulties in the activities of daily living, work, relationships and family, and they determine high social and economic costs that represent an important public health problem. The literature has shown that children of parents with mental disorders grow up in environments that are potentially harmful to their mental health and are at risk of neglect...

As chronic illness takes its rightful place as an imperative for planners and policy makers globally, the obligation to provide appropriate self-care management support and promote optimal health among the chronically ill is attracting considerable attention. A generation of insider research into the chronic illness experience has yielded powerful evidence of the critical importance of communic...