Position The Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN) opposes laws and other policies that require nurses to report the results of screening for intimate partner violence (IPV) to law enforcement or other regulatory agencies without the consent of the woman who experiences the IPV. Nurses and other health care professionals, however, should become familiar with laws...

BACKGROUND State-based laws for reporting of health care-associated infections (HAI) have developed and changed dramatically in recent years, affecting the costs of reporting and impact on infection rates. It is necessary for practitioners of infection control to understand these changing legal frameworks and their application to practice. METHODS Employing systematic state-based research, th...

F ew would doubt that animals, particularly companion animals, have enjoyed an enhanced status in our society in recent decades. No longer viewed merely in the agrarian context of providing food and labor assistance for humans, animals are now considered by many as close companions and, as evidenced in various reported studies, as “family members” and even “children.” It is arguable then that w...

BACKGROUND The 1999 Institute of Medicine report on medical errors proposed major changes to the health care system and gained widespread media attention, yet there is limited information on physician or public opinion regarding recommendations from that report. METHODS Mail survey of 1000 Colorado physicians (n = 594) and 1000 national physicians (n = 304), and telephone survey of 500 Colora...

The provision of care for survivors of sexual violence is a medico-legal emergency. However, due to social issues, healthcare providers face several ethical and legal dilemmas when administering care to such survivors at hospitals. Added to these are the compulsions under mandatory reporting laws, which oblige healthcare providers to abide by the ethical commitments of care and treatment, and m...

Trust is vital for promoting positive health care relationships aimed at achieving positive patient outcomes. Patients, as well as the broader society, trust that health care practitioners who have been granted authority by the state to provide safe and beneficial health care are competent to do so. Recent instances where patients have been harmed as the result of treatment that fell below the ...

This article presents findings from a survey examining knowledge of elder abuse among Georgia's coroners. More than half of the 116 respondents indicated that they know "almost nothing" or "a little" about distinguishing signs of physical abuse from signs of aging (54%) and mandatory reporting laws and related elder abuse statutes (63%). When asked the frequency with which older adult cases wer...

Physicians’ knowledge of therapy and counseling stands among the most important issues in the viewpoints of clients who refer to psychiatric centers. Transsexual patients are very important in this regard. The goal of this research is to study their attitude toward doctors’ empathy. A group of transsexual patients who referred to the Tehran Institute of Psychiatry, Iran, answered the Jefferson ...

OBJECTIVE To explore the views and experiences of health sector professionals in Australia regarding a new national law requiring treating practitioners to report impaired health practitioners whose impairments came to their attention in the course of providing treatment. METHOD We conducted a thematic analysis of in-depth, semistructured interviews with 18 health practitioners and 4 medicole...

Pedophilia has become a topic of increased interest, awareness, and concern for both the medical community and the public at large. Increased media exposure, new sexual offender disclosure laws, Web sites that list the names and addresses of convicted sexual offenders, politicians taking a 'get tough' stance on sexual offenders, and increased investigations of sexual acts with children have inc...