3 - Medical, Legal and Ethical Issues (VOCAB) Flashcards
Ending the care of an injured or ill person without obtaining the patient’s consent or without ensuring that someone with equal or greater training will continue care.
Abandonment
A written instruction, signed by the patient and a physician, which documents a patient’s wishes if the patient is unable to communicate his or her wishes.
Advance directive
The use of ethics in decision making; applying ethical values
Applied ethics
A crime that occurs when a person tries to physically harm another in a way that makes the person under attack feel immediately threatened.
Assault
A crime that occurs when there is unlawful touching of a person without the person’s consent.
Battery
The patient’s ability to understand the EMRs questions and the implications of decisions made.
Competence
Protection of a patient’s privacy by not revealing any personal patient information except to law enforcement personnel or EMS personnel caring for the patient.
Confidentiality
Permission to provide care; given by an injured or ill person to a responder.
Consent
The principle that people who intervene to help others must doe their best to ensure their actions will do no harm to the patient.
Do no harm
A type of advanced directive that protects a patient’s right to refuse efforts for resuscitation; also known as do no attempt resuscitation (DNAR) order.
Do not resuscitate (DNR) order
A legal document that expresses a patient’s specific wishes regarding hiss r her health care; also empowers an individual, usually a relative or friend, to speak on behalf of the patient should he or she become seriously injured or ill and unable to speak for him- or herself.
Durable power of attorney for health care
A legal responsibly of some individuals to provide a reasonable standard of emergency care.
Duty to act
A branch of philosophy concerned with the set of moral principles a person holds about what is right and wrong.
Ethics
Permission to receive emergency care granted by a competent adult verbally, nonverbally or through gestures.
Expressed consent
Laws that apply in some circumstances to protect people who provide emergency care without accepting anything in return.
Good Samaritan laws
A person named in a health-care directive, or durable power of attorney for health care, who can make medical decisions on someone else’s behalf.
Health care proxy
Legal concepts that assume a patient would consent to receive emergency care if he or she were physically able to or old enough to do so.
Implied consent
Acting in such a way that the goal is only to help the patient and that all actions are for that purpose.
In good faith
Obligation to act in a particular way in accordance with the law.
Legal obligation
A type of advance directive that outlines the patient’s wishes about certain kinds of medical treatments and procedures that prolong life.
Living will
A situation in which a professional fails to provide a reasonable quality of care, resulting in harm to a patient.
Malpractice
A situation in which a patient has a medical or traumatic condition that is scientifically accepted to be futile should resuscitation be attempted and, therefore, the patient should be considered dead on arrival.
Medical futility
Obligation to act in a particular way in accordance with what is considered morally right.
Moral obligation
Principles relating to issues of right and wrong and how individual people should behave.
Morals
The failure to provide the level of care a person of similar training would provide, thereby causing injury or damage to another.
Negligence
The closest relatives, as defined by state law, of a deceased person; usually the spouse and nearest blood relatives.
Next of kin
A fundamental ethical principle that refers to the provision of competent care, with compassion and respect for human dignity.
Patient’s best interest
The declining of care by a competent patient; a patient has the right to refuse the care of anyone who responds to an emergency scene.
Refusal of care
The criterion establishes for the extent and quality of an EMRs care.
Standard of care
A third party with the legal right to make decisions for another person regarding medical and health issues through a durable power of attorney and health care.
Surrogate decision maker
