Competency assessment of medical and psychiatric patients under Maryland's Health Care Decisions Act.

Maryland's 1993 Health Care Decisions Act--implications for health care practitioners.

Assessment of psychiatric patients' competency to give informed consent: legal safeguard of civil right to autonomous decision-making.

Amendment of the Mental Health and Welfare Law in Japan will limit admission for medical care and protection only for those individuals who are incapable of giving consent to admission. This is a first in the history of the Japanese mental health legislation. By reviewing the law and psychiatric literature, it is argued that: (i) informed consent is a legal transaction that embodies the idea of...

A risk assessment based approach to the management of acute poisoning.

Early assessment and management of poisoning constitutes a core emergency medicine competency. Medical and psychiatric emergencies coexist; the acute poisoning is a dynamic medical illness that represents an acute exacerbation of a chronic underlying psychosocial disorder. The emergency physician must use an approach that ensures early decisions address potentially time critical interventions, ...

Competency and the Capacity to Make Treatment Decisions: A Primer for Primary Care Physicians.

Common law dictates that individuals possess autonomy and self-determination, which encompass the right to accept or refuse medical treatment. Management of medical treatment can be complicated in situations when the ability of the patient to make reasonable decisions is called into question. Our legal system endorses the principle that all persons are competent to make reasoned decisions unles...

Investigating the Information Technology Competency of Nurses in Critical Care Units: A cross-sectional study

Introduction: With the rapid growth of information technology (IT) and the expectations of health care environments, the presence of nurses with informatics skills in the health care environment to effectively use and manage health care information in health care delivery seems necessary; therefore, this study was conducted to evaluate the IT competency of special care nurses from their point o...