Advance Directives and HIV: A Current Trend in the Inner City

Advance directives and older people: ethical challenges in the promotion of advance directives in New Zealand.

In New Zealand an advance directive can be either an oral statement or a written document. Such directives give individuals the opportunity to make choices about future medical treatment in the event they are cognitively impaired or otherwise unable to make their preferences known. All consumers of health care have the right to make an advance directive in accordance with the common law. When w...

A case for advance directives.

[Temporal trend in understanding of and attitudes to advance directives in patients with chronic diseases].

OBJECTIVE To describe patients' degree of knowledge about their diseases and advance directives, as well as their willingness to write these documents, among patients with chronic diseases seen in the emergency department. METHODS We performed a prospective, comparative, cross-sectional study, without intervention and with consecutive patient inclusion in two periods (2003 and 2008). Demograp...

Law, autonomy and advance directives.

The principle of autonomy underpins legal regulation of advance directives that refuse life-sustaining medical treatment. The primacy of autonomy in this domain is recognised expressly in the case law, through judicial pronouncement, and implicitly in most Australian jurisdictions, through enactment into statute of the right to make an advance directive. This article seeks to justify autonomy a...

Dementia, death and advance directives.

This article considers the ethics of advance directives, especially in relation to conditions such as dementia. For some choices, such as over whether one's life should end at home or in a hospice, advance directives can be very enlightened and helpful. For others, such as those to end the life of an autonomous subject, against their will, have no moral appeal and would rightly be ignored. In a...