Clinical ethics consultants navigate dilemmas across patient care, public health, and healthcare policy. Issues span from the beginning to the end of life, complex discharges, employment of novel technologies, and visitation restrictions. The second edition relays the narratives of fraught, complex consultations through richly detailed cases. Authors explore the ethical reasoning, professional issues, and emotional aspects of these impossibly difficult scenarios. Describing the affective aspects of ethics consultations, authors highlight the lasting effects of these cases on their practices. They candidly reflect on evolving professional practice as well as contemporary concerns and innovations while attending to equity and inclusivity. Featuring many new chapters, cases are grouped together by theme to aid teaching, discussion, and professional growth. The book is intended for clinicians, bioethicists, and ethics committee members with an interest in the choices made in real-life medical dilemmas as well as the emotional cost to those working to improve the situations.

Review

‘This rich anthology reminds us that clinical case consultation is a complicated process that is personal and intuitive, often haunting practitioners with memories that are both disturbing and instructive. Professors Ford and Dudzinski have brilliantly capitalized on the pedagogical value of these musings, editing a volume that will enrich teaching in the seminar room or at the bedside. This new edition places the current generation of practitioners into conversation with their pioneering predecessors from the first edition, reminding readers of the enduring values that should inform case consultation. This volume belongs in the library of every student and teacher of bioethics.’ Joseph J. Fins, M. D., D. Hum. Litt. (hc), M.A.C.P., F.R.C.P.; E. William Davis, Jr., M.D. Professor of Medical Ethics and Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics; Weill Cornell Medicine and Chair of the Hastings Center Board of Trustees; Author of Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics and the Struggle for Consciousness

Book Description

The book contains 28 cases written by clinical ethicists that explore emotional and humanistic aspects of difficult consultations