Clinicians must avoid violating professional ethical principles and patients’ legal rights and they may not ever discriminate. So, what does that mean in practice?

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.

Going to so-called safety-net clinics could mean being subject to different standards of care than those in other health care delivery settings. Learners who understand social determinants of health might be able to help patients navigate the system and access community resources.

Regularly scheduled dialysis is not standard of care for most undocumented immigrants in the United States, so preventative care, and advocacy for it, is needed.

Undocumented immigrants treated with isoniazid (INH) for latent tuberculosis infection should be covered for transplant for INH-related liver failure.

The separation of dental and medical care is a medical ethics issue because it negatively impacts vulnerable populations who lack access to dental care.

This month, AMA Journal of Ethics theme editor Colleen Farrell, a fourth-year medical student at Harvard Medical School, interviewed Lachlan Forrow, MD, about the benefits of interprofessional collaboration and the importance of biopsychosocial approaches to patient care.

Having implied that a particular clinical decision had been made to “free up a hospital bed,” the attending physician walked away without further comments to the residents or talking with the patient.

Eliciting the patient’s motives and goals and helping the patient and her loved ones explore alternatives are essential to maintaining trusting relationships and open communication.

Society is best served by an approach to conscience that combines a progressive understanding of patients’ needs, a nuanced determination of when those needs translate into claims, and a limited role for conscientious refusal.