OBJECTIVES This study was designed to identify and compare the attitudes of patients and health care professionals towards advance directives. Advance directives promote recognition of the patient's autonomy, letting the individual exercise a certain measure of control over life-sustaining care and treatment in the eventuality of becoming incompetent. DESIGN Attitudes to advance directives we...

BACKGROUND Person-centred practice in medicine may provide solutions to several pressing problems in health care, including the cost of services, poor outcomes in chronic care and the rise in litigation. It is also an ethical imperative in itself. However, patient- or person-centred care is not well researched partly because of a lack of conceptual and definitional clarity. AIM The aim of thi...

Physicians encounter complex and sensitive ethical challenges in the medical care of pregnant women with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. This paper identifies those ethical challenges and provides concrete clinical guidance for how they should be addressed in obstetric care. The paper begins with a brief historical review, to highlight and to call into question the civil rights mo...

Genetic counseling is a well-established healthcare discipline that provides individuals and families with health information about disorders that have a genetic component in a supportive counseling encounter. It has recently been applied in the context of psychiatric disorders (like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression and anxiety...

Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) is a life-saving intervention in emergency medical care practiced globally for the last more than seven decades. It cannot be a solution to prevent every death and there are risks associated with this intervention. This article focuses on the ethical dilemmas related to the decisions of medical futility in cardiopulmonary resuscitation particularly in emergen...

OBJECTIVES To study empirically whether ethical theory (from the mainstream principles-based, virtue-based, and feminist schools) usefully describes the approaches doctors and nurses take in everyday patient care. DESIGN Ethnographic methods: participant observation and interviews, the transcripts of which were analysed to identify themes in ethical approaches. SETTING A British old-age psy...

Gillon is correct that the four principles provide a sound and useful way of analysing moral dilemmas. As he observes, the approach using these principles does not provide a unique solution to dilemmas. This can be illustrated by alternatives to Gillon's own analysis of the four case scenarios. In the first scenario, a different set of factual assumptions could yield a different conclusion abou...

In this chapter three approaches to principles are reviewed. Firstly the FourPrinciple approach as described by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress. Secondly Robert Veatch’s theory of medical ethics based on a contract relation and lexical ordering of principles giving priority to autonomy. Finally Engelhardt’s Principle of permission, amending his first edition which was based on a two-principle...

Because of a dearth of literature, we developed preventive ethics strategies for managing the pregnancies of patients with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia can chronically and variably impair a woman's decisions concerning the management of pregnancy, including the decision about whether to continue the pregnancy through to viability and term. The psychiatrist must balance autonomy-based and benefi...

The Sri Lanka Journal of Forensic Medicine, Science & Law (SLJFMSL) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published biannually in June and December each year by the Department Faculty University Peradeniya, Lanka.The mission SLJFMSL to stimulate, encourage empower researchers publish high quality research order promote evidence based practice provide platform for share experiences knowled...