Undocumented patients are a vulnerable population, since they often lack access to health insurance and can be afraid to present for care. This month on Ethics Talk, we discuss challenges in caring for undocumented patients with Dr. Mark Kuczewski, Scott Schweikart, and Dr. Nancy Berlinger.

Patients’ immigration concerns can be addressed when clinicians adopt a public health approach to caring: wearing buttons, distributing brochures, inviting experience sharing, and directing patients to needed resources.

Awareness of transference reactions, practicing active listening and reflection, pausing, and articulating one’s understanding of another’s emotional motivations can help cultivate deeper patient-clinician relationships at the end of life.

Barriers to effective prognosis conversations include knowledge deficits, misconceptions, cultural differences, and lack of motivation. These can be addressed head-on by good communication interventions.

An educational initiative is described in which medical and bioethics students observe health care in an urban jail for two days and reflect on their learning.

Transparency about teaching hospitals’ educational mission respects patient autonomy and aligns patients’ interests with those of trainees and the public.

Establishing criteria for compassion maximization would help us do better than harm minimization.

建立同情心最大化的標準將有助於我們做得比傷害最小化更好

Establecer criterios para maximizar la compasión nos ayudaría a lograr algo mejor que la minimización del daño.