Decision-making capacity can be preserved in patients with mental illness and should be formally assessed in the context of their values and past decisions.
Withholding information from patients during an informed consent process is ethically unacceptable. Patients may restrict the amount of information they wish to receive or designate someone else to receive the information for them.
Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Dorothy E. Roberts, JD
The call for structural competency encourages medicine to broaden its approach to matters of race and culture so that it might better address both individual-level doctor and patient characteristics and institutional factors.
In the September 2014 issue on physicians as agents of social change, Dr. Audiey Kao, editor-in-chief of Virtual Mentor interviewed Dr. Rajiv Shah, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development or USAID.