Despite the benefits of advance directives (AD) to patients and care providers, they are often not completed due to lack of patient awareness. The purpose of the current article is to advocate for creation and use of an innovative information visualization (infovisual) as a health communication tool aimed at improving AD dissemination and engagement. The infovisual would promote AD awareness by...

The authors of this exploratory study used textual analysis of transcribed interviews to examine the mental constructs that individuals form around advance care terminology and to learn how elderly veterans conceptualize the language used in the Veterans Administration advance directive. They found that respondents often negotiated meaning by drawing on rigid schemas, specific mental constructs...

Hunger strikes potentially present a serious challenge for attending physicians. Though rare, in certain cases, a conflict can occur between the obligations of beneficence and autonomy. On the one hand, physicians have a duty to preserve life, which entails intervening in a hunger strike before the hunger striker loses his life. On the other hand, physicians' duty to respect autonomy implies th...

Non-therapeutic ventilation of potential organ donors would increase the supply of kidneys for transplantation. There are no major ethical objections to it. The means of permitting it are forbidden by laws with an ethical basis. A law permitting it would need an ethical basis. Introducing a third legal method of diagnosing death would be unethical. Expanding the power of the advance directive t...

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Dementia is highly prevalent and incurable. The participation of dementia patients in clinical research is indispensable if we want to find an effective treatment for dementia. However, one of the primary challenges in dementia research is the patients' gradual loss of the capacity to consent. Patients with dementia are characterized by the fact that, at an earlier stage of their life, they wer...

OBJECTIVES To describe Chinese nursing home residents' knowledge of advance directive (AD) and end-of-life care preferences and to explore the predictors of their preference for AD. DESIGN Population-based cross-sectional survey. SETTINGS Nursing homes (n = 31) in Wuhan, Mainland Southern China. PARTICIPANTS Cognitively intact nursing home residents (n = 467) older than 60 years. MEASUR...

This article presents the new German law on advance directives from 1 September 2009. The history of the parliamentary process of this law is described, the present regulations are explained, their relevance for medical practice discussed and shortcomings are identified. Finally, the new law is compared with other regulations in the international context. Previously established legal practice i...

An Advance care directive entitles a person to request in advance either the refusal of or consent to certain medical treatment if that person is not competent to consent or refuse at the time such refusal or consent is required. The 2003 Law Reform Commission’s Consultation Paper on Law and the Elderly briefly mentioned advance directives. However, the Paper decided to leave the issue to a fut...