Management Education in Public Health: Further Considerations Comment on "Management Matters: A Leverage Point for Health Systems Strengthening in Global Health".

Knowing and applying the basic management functions of planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling, as well as their permutations and combinations, are vital to effective delivery of public health services. Presently, graduate programs that prepare public health professionals neither emphasize teaching management theory, nor its application. This deficit puts those who become managers in public health and those they serve at a distinct disadvantage. This deficit can be remedied by enhanced teaching of management subjects.

Physician-assisted suicide: legal and ethical considerations.

As medicine's technical limits have become increasingly clear, Americans seem more willing to address end-of-life decisionmaking. A major development during the 1990s was physician assistance in dying: physician-assisted suicide in Michigan, Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, and developments in Europe, most notably The Netherlands. This evolution toward recognizing the appropriateness of assistance in dying raises legal and ethical issues for physicians and healthcare institutions such as nursing facilities and acute care hospitals. These issues include the effects on providers' values systems, the trust between patient and provider, and the "slippery slope" that voluntary, active assistance in dying will become involuntary, active assistance. This Article addresses the policy issues that institutions must confront in a changing environment.

Assistance in dying: part I. Europe--the vanguard.

This Nexus provides background information about assistance in dying. The international perspective based on developments in Western Europe, especially the Netherlands, provides a useful context in which to place events in the United States. Part II considers the history and legal context of assistance in dying in the United States. Oregon is given special attention because it remains the only state with legally sanctioned assistance in dying. Readers are urged to bear in mind the definitions and distinctions among assisted dying, the various forms of euthanasia, and physician-assisted suicide. Informed observers of the discussion will readily see that the terms and concepts are often used imprecisely and as though they are synonymous. Productive debate of assistance in dying will occur only if all those involved agree on definitions and the meaning of the concepts.

The "new" medical malpractice crisis--part 1.

It is important to put the current medical malpractice crisis into the historical context of the past several decades. Doing so provides an important perspective from which to understand the current iteration. One may reasonably conclude that the present medical malpractice situation is only the latest outbreak of a continuing, chronic condition, rather than a distinct, unusual event. In this regard, it is analogous to a chronic disease that occasionally flares up. Chronicity suggests the presence of major underlying problems, which may be linked to insurance carriers' business cycles as much as reflecting increases in either medical malpractice or the numbers and value of claims. It is useful to bear in mind that the fact of a claim may or may not indicate actual medical malpractice, and increased claims could well correlate more closely with patients' disgruntlement with the medical delivery system, access to it, and the way they were treated by staff than with significant injuries for which compensation should be paid. Regulatory and public policy efforts to date have only affected the problem of medical malpractice at the margin. Apparently, the core of the problem has not been addressed; in fact, it seems as yet to be unidentified. Solutions that focus on the economic dimensions only address the symptoms-claims for medical malpractice-and apparently have done nothing to correct the root cause(s). Part 2 of this two-part series considers and analyzes the current medical malpractice insurance crisis. Its evolution and analysis of specific aspects may provide guidance in understanding how to predict its future course. More important, the analysis will suggest guidance as to how organizations may reduce the potential for the problem and protect themselves from the negative aspects, should it occur.