Traditionally the great majority of health care related malpractice suits have involved physicians and hospitals. Increasingly, however, greater attention is being given to nurses as potential defendants and thus as sources for recovery in malpractice suits. As a result, more recognition is emerging for nursing as a profession accountable for its practice. This article will examine the concept of accountability by:

1. 1. reviewing selected legal principles of malpractice;

2. 2. discussing the trend toward increased inclusion of nurses in malpractice actions and the implications of this trend; and

3. 3. describing an Expert Nurse Witness and Consultation Service which was developed to provide nursing opinion on the professionally accepted standard of nursing practice.

Pain can be a body-wrenching curse. Yet it is often a life-defining and supporting blessing!

Pain is a distinct physiological event, yet it is also an emotional, social, spiritual, and economic force. Pain in its more destructive form alters lives, changes relationships, and disrupts families.

Quality pain management should not be just a pharmacological response to a medical situation; it must also be a theological, ethical, and societal response to human need. Appropriate pain management is a gift to both the receiver and the provider. As a parish priest, a supervisor of pastoral services, and an ethics resource specialist, I have seen many pain-filled situations that have involved multiples of these dimensions.

Born in 1969, Casey died in 1995, just a few months after his twenty-sixth birthday. Casey was an intelligent, charismatic college student, strong in religious faith, who had few problems … at least until one day in the summer of 1994. That day he began to suffer extreme pain in his lower stomach and bowels.

We are well into the political season that guarantees the election of a new president. Actually, this season, the election cycle began in November 2006, as soon as the off-year election ended. Not surprisingly, health care and reforming health care are major issues for the election — although somewhat less important than they were before late 2007.

I use the phrase “not surprisingly” because there are easily understandable reasons why health care tends to be an election issue whenever we are electing a new president. One obvious reason is that, for several decades, we have been plagued by sizeable numbers of people without health insurance and even more importantly, by unsustainable increases in health care spending and substantial numbers of people experiencing patient safety and clinical appropriateness problems. I regard the unsustainable spending and safety and quality problems as especially important because they affect all of us — not just the 15% of the population that is without health insurance.

In West Virginia, healthy smokers can now sue tobacco companies to require them to fund medical monitoring for health risks associated with smoking. In Blankenship, formally known as In re Tobacco Litigation (Medical Monitoring Case), the Circuit Court for Ohio County permitted a jury to decide the medical monitoring claim, despite the clam’s novelty and controversy. The unanimous jury refused to enforce the plaintiffs’ demands, and the court denied a motion for retrial. This trial was the second attempt of the class action lawsuit; the court had previously declared a mistrial when an attorney used the word “addiction” in front of the jury.

The court certified a class of residents of the state of West Virginia with more than a five “pack-year history” (at least one pack per day for five years) of smoking the defendant tobacco companies’ cigarettes, who did not have any of a list of named smoking-related illnesses, including various cancers and coronary heart disease, and who did not receive health care paid for – or reimbursed by – the state of West Virginia.

Greetings from faraway Australia. We used to think that we were separated from the world’s problems—at once victims and beneficiaries of the tyranny of distance. As recent events have shown, we are all liked together—all are vulnerable. Vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. To global warming. To nuclear catastrophe. To terrorism.

In another September, also in dangerous times, the poet WH. Auden wrote in New York a message for our times. His words have been remembered in recent days. This is what he wrote:

A robust body of research supports the centrality of K-12 education to health and well-being. Critical perspectives, particularly Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit), can deepen and widen health justice’s exploration of how and why a range of educational inequities drive health disparities. The CRT approaches of counternarrative storytelling, race consciousness, intersectionality, and praxis can help scholars, researchers, policymakers, and advocates understand the disparate negative health impacts of education law and policy on students of color, students with disabilities, and those with intersecting identities. Critical perspectives focus upon and strengthen the necessary exploration of how structural racism, ableism, and other systemic barriers manifest in education and drive health disparities so that these barriers can be removed.

Drawing on ethical and legal frameworks in the Netherlands, the United States and France, we examine whether physicians are expected to inform patients about potentially relevant opportunities for expanded access to investigational drugs. While we found no definitive legal obligation, we argue that physicians have a moral obligation to discuss opportunities for expanded access with patients who have run out of treatment options to prevent inequality, to promote autonomy, and to achieve beneficence.

Colorado has consistently had one of the highest rates of suicide in the United States, and El Paso County has the highest number of suicide and firearm-related suicide deaths within the state. Community-based solutions like those of the Suicide Prevention Collaborative of El Paso County may be more effective in preventing suicide as they are specific to local issues, sensitive to local culture, and informed by local data, community members, and stakeholders.

Two narratives have emerged to describe recent health care reforms in the United States of America (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). One narrative speaks of revolution, that the adoptions of the Affordable Care Act 2010 (ACA) in the US, and the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (HSCA) in the UK, have resulted in fundamental, large-scale philosophical, political and legal change in the jurisdictions’ respective health care systems. The other narrative evokes evolution, identifying each new legislative scheme as a natural development of existing governance structures. Policymakers in both the US and UK face the problem of a health care system which, as traditionally envisaged, cannot offer universal access to health care at a reasonable, or politically acceptable, price

This paper discusses the obligation of acute care hospitals and emergency services to treat patients. Since care rendered in these settings is, of necessity, provided by health care professionals, not buildings or programs, the obligation may be twofold. First, are there obligations for hospitals and emergency services to offer treatment? Second, do health care professionals practicing in these settings have an independent obligation to treat? How has the Supreme Court decision in Cruzan affected these obligations?

The tradition in this country has been that private hospitals had no obligation to treat patients, as opposed to public hospitals which were frequently set up for the very purpose of treating patients who had no other access to care. Over the years, statutes and case law have limited the rights of private hospitals and physicians to refuse to treat patients.