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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Are medical ethicists out of touch?
— practitioner attitudes in the US and UK towards decisions at the end of life | | Author(s) | Donna L Dickenson |
| Journal title | Journal of Medical Ethics, vol 26, no 4, August 2000 |
| Pages | pp 254-260 |
| Keywords | Doctors ; Nurses ; Attitude ; Terminal care ; Social ethics ; Comparison ; United Kingdom ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | The objective of this research was to assess whether UK and US health care professionals share the views of medical ethicists about medical futility, withdrawing or withholding treatment, ordinary and extraordinary interventions, and the doctrine of double effect. An attitudinal questionnaire was completed by 469 UK nurses studying the Open University course on "Death and dying", and was compared with a similar questionnaire administered to 759 US nurses and 687 US doctors taking the Hastings Center course on "Decisions near the end of life". The results showed that practitioners accept the relevance of concepts widely disparaged by bioethicists e.g. double effect, medical futility. Yet in conclusion, professionals' beliefs differ substantially from the recommendations of their professional bodies and from majority opinion in bioethics. Bioethicists should be cautious about assuming that their opinions will be readily accepted by practitioners. (KJ/RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-001116201 A |
| Classmark | QT2: QTE: DP: LV: TQ: 48: 8: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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