Mystery shopping in psychiatric service evaluation – ethical issues

Mystery shopping in health service evaluation.

BACKGROUND Over the last 5 years, primary care telephone triage systems have been introduced in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, and most recently in New Zealand. Evaluation of the clinical safety of such systems poses a challenge for health planners and researchers. AIM To evaluate the use of simulated patients in the assessment of aspects of clinical safety in a pilot New Zeala...

Ethical issues in long-term psychiatric management.

Two general ethical problems in psychiatry are thrown into sharp relief by long term care. This article discusses each in turn, in the context of two anonymised case studies from actual clinical practice. First, previous mental health legislation soothed doubts about patients' refusal of consent by incorporating time limits on involuntary treatment. When these are absent, as in the provisions f...

ETHICAL ISSUES IN MEDICAL STATISTICS

Medical statistics (biostatistics), as a vital essential part of modem life, does raise some fundamental ethical issues. Surprisingly, this aspect seems to have been totally ignored by books on medical ethics. This paper discusses how the statistical aspects affect the ethics. The relation between biostatistics and medical research is explored. All stages of a medical research exercise are ...

Ethical issues in forensic psychiatric research on mentally disordered offenders.

This paper analyses ethical issues in forensic psychiatric research on mentally disordered offenders, especially those detained in the psychiatric treatment system. The idea of a 'dual role' dilemma afflicting forensic psychiatry is more complicated than acknowledged. Our suggestion acknowledges the good of criminal law and crime prevention as a part that should be balanced against familiar res...

Software as a Service (SaaS) ethical issues