Ethics Flashcards
What are the four principles of bioethics?
Respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice
What is autonomy?
Self determination that is free from both controlling interferences by others and personal limitations preventing meaningful choice
Personal limitations that prevent meaningful choice are things like what?
Inadequate understanding, faulty reasoning
How do we as physicians demonstrate respect for autonomy?
Sharing information with the patient about their condition and options for therapy, obtaining informed consent, and accepting delegated authority
Physicians have a responsibility to provide information and help their patients understand what?
Their medical condition and options for treatment
Consent occurs when?
A patient gives permission to avail themselves of various medical services
What are the requirements for consent to qualify as informed?
Competence, disclosure, understanding, voluntariness
What are varieties of consent?
Express, implied, tacit, presumed
What is considered future-oriented consent?
Personal identity and advance directives
What are examples of circumstances where the ability of the patient to exercise autonomy and/or provide informed consent can be complicated?
Emergency conditions, when information is not or not fully disclosed, when there are conflicting priorities or necessities, when patients are incapacitated, when patients are minors
In emergency conditions, how should the physician proceed?
As medically indicated even without consent, or with “presumed consent”
Physicians should always provide information about a patient (including errors in care) to the patient, unless…
The patient doesn’t want it and/or preferentially wants someone else to receive it on their behalf
When can you pace the release of information to a patient?
If the patient is simply not able to comprehend the totality of the information at one time
When can physicians decline to follow a patient’s directives?
When they endanger public health, have the potential to harm others, or they require a scarce resource
When a patient lacks decision-making capability, what is the ethical responsibility of the physician?
To identify an appropriate surrogate to make the decisions, to provide advice, guidance, and support to the surrogate, and to assist the surrogate to make decisions in keeping with the standard of substituted judgement and the patient’s best interest
What is substituted judgement?
The patient’s preferences as expressed in an advanced directive or as documented in the medical record, the patient’s views about life and how it should be lived, how the patient constructed their life story, and the patient’s attitude toward sickness, suffering, and certain medical procedures
Decisions regarding the patient’s best interest should include consideration of what?
The pain and suffering associated with the intervention, the degree of and potential for benefit, the impairments that may result from the intervention, and the quality of life as experienced by the patient
When should you consult an ethics committee or other institutional resource?
When no surrogate is available, when ongoing disagreement about a treatment decision can’t be resolved, or when the physician judges that the surrogate’s decision is “off”
Why might a physician judge a surrogate’s decision to be “off”?
It is clearly not what the patient would have decided, it could not reasonably be judged to be in the patient’s best interest, or it primarily serves the interests of the surrogate rather than the patient
Who can legally provide informed consent?
Those 18 or older, emancipated minors, minors with specific conditions/requirements, and mature minors
What specific conditions/requirements make a minor able to legally provide informed consent?
Sexually transmitted infections, birth control, pregnancy, assault victims, substance abuse, psychiatric illness