Dr Morgan C. Shields joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Zohra Kantawala and Dr Ramesh Raghavan: “Why Patient-Centered Built Environment Standards Matter More Than Numbers of Beds in Inpatient Psychiatry”
Quality improvement initiatives in clinical medicine are part research and part patient care and pose challenges to traditional forms of ethical oversight.
Medical technology presents a new ethical question in the case of a patient with a left ventricular assist device who, when informed that he has pneumonia and is ineligible for a heart transplant, asks that the LVAD be turned off.
Physicians’ ethical obligations to disclose conflicts of interest to patients and to obtain their informed consent for treatment are particularly critical when proposed treatments are experimental.