Micro Data: Wearable Devices Contribute to Improved Chronic Disease Management.

Issues involving chronic disease prevention and management (CDPM) are prevalent in today's aging society, and suggestions for improvement are essential to treat this patient demographic effectively. This article addresses the use of wearable devices for the medical community to improve CDPM by relying on the accumulation of micro data. For the patient, we recognize that these devices can be an effective tool to facilitate real-time monitoring of their vital signs and activity levels. With real-time monitoring and earlier responses, individuals can benefit by preventing, delaying or reducing exacerbations of chronic diseases. Use of these devices also has great benefit to the person and has the potential to decrease the individual's emergency room visits, hospital admissions and re-admissions. As patients and their healthcare providers work together to identify cumulative trends in their micro data, transitions in care planning will be enhanced, further contributing to improved chronic disease management.

Difficult healthcare transitions: Ethical analysis and policy recommendations for unrepresented patients.

BACKGROUND: In Ontario, Canada, patients who lack decision-making capacity and have no family or friends to act as substitute decision-makers currently rely on the Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee to consent to long-term care (nursing home) placement, but they have no legal representative for other placement decisions. OBJECTIVES: We highlight the current gap in legislation for difficult transition cases involving unrepresented patients and provide a novel framework for who ought to assist with making these decisions and how these decisions ought to be made. RESEARCH DESIGN: This paper considers models advanced by Volpe and Steinman with regard to who ought to make placement decisions for unrepresented patients, as well as current ethical models for analyzing how these decisions should be made. PARTICIPANTS AND RESEARCH CONTEXT: We describe an anonymized healthcare transition case to illustrate the fact that there is no legally recognized decision-maker for placement destinations other than long-term care facilities and to show how this impacts all stakeholders. ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS: The case provided is an anonymized vignette representing a typical transition case involving an unrepresented patient. FINDINGS: As a result of a gap in provincial legislation, healthcare providers usually determine the appropriate placement destination without a clear framework to guide the process and this can cause significant moral distress. DISCUSSION: We argue for a team decision-making approach in the short term, and a legislative change in the long-term, to respect the patient voice, evaluate benefit and risk, enhance collaboration between healthcare providers and patients, and promote social justice. We believe that our approach, which draws upon the strengths of interprofessional teams, will be of interest to all who are concerned with the welfare and ethical treatment of the patients for whom they care. CONCLUSIONS: One of the main strengths of our recommendation is that it provides all members of the healthcare team (including nurses, social workers, therapists, and others) an increased opportunity to advocate on behalf of unrepresented patients.

Disability and dignity-enabling home environments.

In Canada where long-term care is primarily oriented to elderly persons and affordable accessible housing is limited, younger disabled adults may be living in circumstances that do not meet their health needs and contribute to their social exclusion. The purpose of this study was to undertake an ethical analysis of what constitute an 'adequate' home environment for adults with significant mobility disabilities. An integrated design was used that combined qualitative interviews with normative ethical analysis in an iterative process. Twenty interviews with 19 participants were conducted in Ontario, Canada with two groups: younger adults (ages 18-55) with mobility disabilities and 'decision-makers' who consisted of policy makers, program administrators and discharge planners. Data were analyzed using a critical disability ethics approach and processes of reflective equilibrium. Drawing on Nora Jacobson's (Jacobson, 2009) taxonomy of dignity and pluralistic approaches to social justice, the concept of 'social dignity' provides a lens for exploring the adequacy of home environments for disabled people. Analyses suggested seven threshold conditions necessary for a dignity-enabling home: the ability to form and sustain meaningful relationships; access to community and civic life; access to control and flexibility of daily activities; access to opportunities for self-expression and identity affirmation; access to respectful relationships with attendants; access to opportunities to participate in school, work or leisure; access to physical, psychological and ontological security. The results have implications for housing, health and social care policies, and political reform. Social dignity provides a normative ethical grounding for assessing the adequacy of home environments. The threshold elements outline specific dignity-enabling conditions that are open to further specification or elaboration in different contexts.

Successful Advance Directives through Quality Disease Management.

Recently there has been talk about the benefit of advance care planning. This is an issue which resurfaces from time to time, as is evident in recent New England Journal of Medicine articles and editorials (April 2010). It has also resurfaced in Canada in a recent document titled Advance Care Planning in Canada: National Framework for Consultation (Health Canada 2010). This document acknowledges that many of us believe in the value of advance directives, finding "that most of the general public (60-90%) is supportive of advance care planning. However, only 10-20% of the public in the US, Canada and Australia have completed an advance care plan of any kind" (Health Canada 2010: 6). In Muriel R. Gillick's editorial in the New England Journal Medicine, she strongly makes the point that few people complete advance directives and further states that "directives have been a resounding failure" (Gillick 2010: 1239). These statements, although not exhaustive on the subject, show that we have a problem translating the support for advance directives into actual plans.

The beneficial role of a judicial process when "everything" is too much?

This narrative is written with the intent to encourage physicians as well as other healthcare professionals to use judicial processes, such as those provided by the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board, to help resolve conflict with treatment decisions between care providers and decision-makers. Through the presentation of a fictional yet common case scenario, it is argued that after all attempts at mediation have been attempted that the timely use of a third party is in the patient's, the family's and the healthcare team's best interests.

Just regionalisation: rehabilitating care for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses.

BACKGROUND: Regionalised models of health care delivery have important implications for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses yet the ethical issues surrounding disability and regionalisation have not yet been explored. Although there is ethics-related research into disability and chronic illness, studies of regionalisation experiences, and research directed at improving health systems for these patient populations, to our knowledge these streams of research have not been brought together. Using the Canadian province of Ontario as a case study, we address this gap by examining the ethics of regionalisation and the implications for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. The critical success factors we provide have broad applicability for guiding and/or evaluating new and existing regionalised health care strategies. DISCUSSION: Ontario is in the process of implementing fourteen Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs). The implementation of the LHINs provides a rare opportunity to address systematically the unmet diverse care needs of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. The core of this paper provides a series of composite case vignettes illustrating integration opportunities relevant to these populations, namely: (i) rehabilitation and services for people with disabilities; (ii) chronic illness and cancer care; (iii) senior's health; (iv) community support services; (v) children's health; (vi) health promotion; and (vii) mental health and addiction services. For each vignette, we interpret the governing principles developed by the LHINs - equitable access based on patient need, preserving patient choice, responsiveness to local population health needs, shared accountability and patient-centred care - and describe how they apply. We then offer critical success factors to guide the LHINs in upholding these principles in response to the needs of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. SUMMARY: This paper aims to bridge an important gap in the literature by examining the ethics of a new regionalisation strategy with a focus on the implications for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses across multiple sites of care. While Ontario is used as a case study to contextualize our discussion, the issues we identify, the ethical principles we apply, and the critical success factors we provide have broader applicability for guiding and evaluating the development of - or revisions to - a regionalised health care strategy.