Limits of advance directives in decision-making around food and nutrition in patients with dementia.

Advance directives are critically important for capable individuals who wish to avoid the burdens of life-prolonging interventions in the advanced stages of dementia. However, this paper will argue that advance directives should have less application to questions about feeding patients during the clinical course of dementia than often has been presumed. The argument will be framed within the debate between Ronald Dworkin and Rebecca Dresser regarding the moral authority of precedent autonomy to determine an individual's future end-of-life care plan. We will use a brief analysis of the positions taken in two important papers that come out of the Dworkin/Dresser debate and a hypothetical patient, John, who will be followed from diagnosis of dementia to death, to show how advance directives should apply to key points in the progression of his disease, particularly in relation to food and nutrition.

Tertiary Healthcare Ethics Consultation: Enhancing Access to Expertise.

Tertiary healthcare ethics (HCE) consultation occurs when an HCE consultant at a healthcare facility requests guidance from one or more senior HCE consultants who are not members of that facility's HCE consultation service. Tertiary HCE consultants provide advanced HCE guidance and/or mentoring to facility (secondary) HCE consultants, mirroring healthcare consultation in clinical practice. In this article, we describe advantages and challenges of providing tertiary HCE consultation through a hub-and-spoke model administered by a national integrated HCE service.

COVID-19 Ethics Debrief: Pearls and Pitfalls of a Hub and Spoke Model.

A hub and spoke model offers an effective and efficient approach to providing informed guidance to those who need it. The National Center for Ethics in Health Care (NCEHC) at the Veterans Health Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, is the largest known hub and spoke healthcare ethics delivery model. In this article, we describe ways NCEHC's hub and spoke configuration succeeded during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as limitations of the model and possible improvements to inform adoption at other healthcare systems.

Between Usual and Crisis Phases of a Public Health Emergency: The Mediating Role of Contingency Measures.

Much of the sustained attention on pandemic preparedness has focused on the ethical justification for plans for the "crisis" phase of a surge when, despite augmentation efforts, the demand for life-saving resources outstrips supply. The ethical frameworks that should guide planning and implementation of the "contingency" phase of a public health emergency are less well described. The contingency phase is when strategies to augment staff, space, and supplies are systematically deployed to forestall critical resource scarcity, reduce disproportionate harm to patients and health care providers, and provide patient care that remains functionally equivalent to conventional practice. We describe an ethical framework to inform planning and implementation for COVID-19 contingency surge responses and apply this framework to 3 use cases. Examining the unique ethical challenges of this mediating phase will facilitate proactive ethics conversations about healthcare operations during the contingency phase and ideally lead to ethically stronger health care practices.

"Doc, I'm Going for a Walk": Liberalizing or Restricting the Movement of Hospitalized Patients-Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Considerations.

When patients are admitted to the hospital, they are generally expected to remain in or within close proximity to their assigned rooms in order to promote their safety and appropriate medical care. Although there are circumstances when patients may safely leave their hospital room or floor, guidance within the medical literature for the management of patient movement within the hospital are lacking. Excessive restrictions on patient movement may be seen as overly paternalistic, while lax requirements may interfere with high quality care, patient safety and efficient hospital practice. As a result, guidance in the form of institutional policy is warranted. Such policy development should take into consideration the potential clinical, legal, and ethical concerns in balancing the competing values of patients' preferences and respect for autonomy, while ensuring high quality, safe, and efficacious medical care. This paper will provide a framework for hospitals to create institution-specific patient movement policies that are fair, systematic, and transparent.

Religious Insanity: A Diagnosis at the Intersection of 19th Century American Religion and Psychiatry.

Among the more common admission diagnoses of patients admitted to 19th century American asylums that have now disappeared completely from the psychiatric nosology is "religious insanity." This article presents a review of the historical and sociological research, which suggests the theory that religious belief and practice was a common cause of insanity, hence the diagnosis of "religious insanity." The way in which the diagnosis developed at the intersection of Protestant revival movements and the growth of modern asylum psychiatry in the United States, and thereby served several important functions in psychiatry and society, is discussed. The article concludes with reflections on how the rise and fall of the theory of religion as a primary cause or contributor to insanity in the 19th century mirrors the often conflicted relationship between religion and psychiatry in modern history and the difficulty in drawing scientifically reliable and morally justifiable lines between spiritual experience and mental illness in any cultural period.

The Role of Communication and Interpersonal Skills in Clinical Ethics Consultation: The Need for a Competency in Advanced Ethics Facilitation.

Clinical ethics consultants (CECs) often face some of the most difficult communication and interpersonal challenges that occur in hospitals, involving stressed stakeholders who express, with strong emotions, their preferences and concerns in situations of personal crisis and loss. In this article we will give examples of how much of the important work that ethics consultants perform in addressing clinical ethics conflicts is incompletely conceived and explained in the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation and the clinical ethics literature. The work to which we refer is best conceptualized as a specialized type of interviewing, in which the emotional barriers of patients and their families or surrogates can be identified and addressed in light of relevant ethical obligations and values within the context of ethics facilitation.

Futility in Chronic Anorexia Nervosa: A Concept Whose Time Has Not Yet Come.

Comparatively little scholarly attention has been given to the question of futility in chronic psychiatric disorders, with the exception of a small body of work on so-called end-stage anorexia nervosa (AN). A review of this literature provides the background for a critical examination of whether the concept of futility has any clinically meaningful, ethically justifiable, and legally defensible application to AN. In this article, the arguments for and against futility judgments in AN are analyzed with special emphasis on determinations of capacity in this serious mental illness. Parallels between the futility disputes in medical and psychiatric disorders, where applicable, will be drawn to further illuminate whether or not the concept that continued psychiatric treatment for AN is ever truly futile.

Rules and values: a coordinated regulatory and educational approach to the public health crises of chronic pain and addiction.

Chronic pain and opioid addiction are 2 pressing public health problems, and prescribing clinicians often lack the skills necessary to manage these conditions. Our study sought to address the benefits of a coalition of an academic medical center pain faculty and government agencies in addressing the high unintentional overdose death rates in New Mexico. New Mexico's 2012-2013 mandated chronic pain and addiction education programs studied more than 1000 clinicians. Positive changes were noted in precourse and postcourse surveys of knowledge, self-efficacy, and attitudes. Controlled substance dispensing data from the New Mexico Board of Pharmacy also demonstrated safer prescribing. The total morphine and Valium milligram equivalents dispensed have decreased continually since 2011. There was also a concomitant decline in total drug overdose deaths.

How Should MLP Clinicians and Attorneys Help Veterans Secure Disability Benefits When Health Records Documentation Is Insufficient?

This case commentary considers unique features of medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) in the Veterans Health Administration that may potentially mediate and minimize ethical tensions that may arise in MLP collaborations involving diagnosing and documenting disability.

C-L Case Conference: Assessment of Dispositional Capacity in Medically Complex Patients.

We present the case of a 76-year-old male with mild cognitive impairment and delirium who was referred to consultation-liaison psychiatry for an assessment of capacity to choose discharge. Cases involving "dispositional capacity" are complex and increasingly frequent, with momentous consequences for patients and their families, but are rarely discussed in the literature. In this article, experts in functional assessment, cognition, and ethics provide guidance for this commonly encountered clinical scenario based on their experience and available literature. We review the content and formulation of occupational and physical therapy assessments and their utility to the consultation-liaison psychiatrist. We also examine the relationship of cognitive impairment to decisional capacity and offer suggestions on a structured approach to evaluation. Finally, we discuss the ethical and systemic considerations of dispositional capacity and explore potential pitfalls that can lead to interprofessional conflict and missed opportunities in patient care.

Is There a Case for Palliative Care Addiction Psychiatry?

This commentary on a case suggests how palliative care psychiatry can facilitate compassionate resolution of ethical conflicts in end-of-life care decision making with persons with substance use disorders.

Veterans Health Administration response to 2021 recall of Philips Respironics devices: A case study.

This case study describes, for the time frame of June 2021 through August 2022, the U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VHA) organizational response to a manufacturer's recall of positive airway pressure devices used in the treatment of sleep disordered breathing. VHA estimated it could take over a year for Veterans to receive replacement devices. Veterans awaiting a replacement faced a dilemma. They could continue using the recalled devices and bear the product safety risks that led to the recall, or they could stop using them and bear the risks of untreated sleep disordered breathing. Using a program monitoring approach, we report on the processes VHA put in place to respond to the recall. Specifically, we report on the strategic, service, and operational plans associated with VHA's response to the recall for Veterans needing replacement devices. In program monitoring, the strategic plan reflects the internal process objectives for the program. The service plan articulates how the delivery of services will intersect the customer journey. The operational plan describes how the program's resources and actions must support the service delivery plan. VHA's strategic plan featured a clinician-led, as opposed to primarily legal or administrative response to the recall. The recall response team also engaged with VHA's medical ethics service to articulate an ethical framework guiding the allocation of replacement devices under conditions of scarcity. This framework proposed allocating scarce devices to Veterans according to their clinical need. The service plan invited Veterans to schedule visits with sleep providers who could assess their clinical need and counsel them accordingly. The operational plan distributed devices according to clinical need as they became available. Monitoring our program processes in real time helped VHA launch and adapt its response to a recall affecting more than 700,000 Veterans.