Instead of trying to reduce the number of people who have access to a patient's medical record by quarantining information, hospitals should explain the current meaning of confidentiality to patients as part of the informed consent process.
Because maintaining strict confidentiality is often untenable, or even illegal, determining the extent of protections in the postmortem context ultimately entails a weighing of the various interests at stake.
We must try to understand why there is such certainty about poor prognosis in severe brain-injury cases, when in fact many patients recover, albeit to a level of function most of us would not desire.
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.
Nancy Berlinger, PhD and Annalise Berlinger, BSN, RN
Physicians’ reliance on “culture” to explain patients’ noncompliance may serve as code for their discomfort with difference, uncertainty, and distress.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(6):608-616. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.6.msoc1-1706.