Informed Consent and Surrogate Interference at the Initiation of Community-Based Palliative Care Services.

Community-based palliative care (CBPC) clinicians sometimes contend with an ethically charged scenario when they encounter patients for the first time: The patient's spouse, or other loved one or caregiver, revokes the patient's valid informed consent to initiate care. While surrogates are usually motivated by protective instincts, there are other situations where surrogates act out of self-interest. This article considers whether it is ever ethically justified for an adult to revoke another adult's valid informed consent to initiate palliative care services.

Improving home-based hospice understanding and use of the National Incident Management System for emergency and disaster preparation and response.

Critical to an organized and successful emergency response is having a plan based on the framework used exclusively by community and national emergency service organizations, that is, the National Incident Management System (NIMS). Standardization is vital so that diverse types of organizations can work in harmony to respond to emergencies. NIMS provides the opportunity for this standardization.

Social analysis formation for nurse educators.

This article encourages nurse educators to obtain deeper exposure to philosophical and theological methods of social analysis, as well as firsthand experience of health care injustices, as a means to improve the efficacy of conveying this content to their students. Definitions of social justice and social analysis are offered, and a social analysis methodology for nurse educators is recommended.

Documentary bioethics: visual narratives for Generations X and Y.

Narrative bioethics is primarily understood to involve storytelling through the use of literature. This article suggests that other forms of media are necessary to convey stories of an ethical nature to an audience broader than one being trained as medical professionals. "Documentary bioethics" is a manner to present and interpret stories of an ethical nature using forms of popular electronic media in a reality-based documentary style to society at large, specifically Generations X and Y.