Ethical Decisions in Healthcare: Patients, Families and Professionals

In clinical environments, all decisions are ethical decisions in that they reflect and impact the values of patients, professionals, and families interacting in the healthcare system.  Ethical Decisions in Healthcare: Patients, Families, and Professionals is a casebook that offers real-life clinical ethics cases followed by expert commentary written by the book authors and co-authors.  This text is intended as course companion sourcebook that offers narrative accounts of clinical ethics cases.  By engaging in applied ethics discourse, learners employ an ethical decision-making framework to assess ethical issues, reflect upon biases, gather facts, analyze stakeholder needs and values, consider options, and develop justified responses.  Through this process, learners develop their decision-making skills as moral agents. 

The introduction to the text orients the reader to the context of the text: applied healthcare ethics and informed decision-making. Learners are invited to consider their own professional identities as they explore cases from a variety of perspectives as the authors present a framework for informed decision-making.  The introduction also provides a brief note for educators in the application of the cases to competency-based assessment.  The cases are presented in the third person and offer perspectives from patients, families, students, and healthcare workers.  Each case of followed by suggested questions and prompts for discussion and reflection.  Commentaries that follow the cases explore some of the ethical issues and provide readers with some things to think about as they enter the discourse.  Through these issues, we can analyze the intersections where the professions affect human values and the opportunities that lie between stimulus and response.