News and Events

2nd Annual Bioethics Conference November 7, 2008.

More information available soon for registration for 6 hours of ethics continuing education for social workers and nurses.

Trafficker or Healer? And Who’s the Victim?
John Tierney
New York Times
March 27, 2007

The case of the United States v. William Eliot Hurwitz, which began in federal court here on Monday, is about much more than one physician. It’s a battle over who sets the rules for treating patients who are in pain: narcotics agents and prosecutors, or doctors and scientists.

The Egg Trade — Making Sense of the Market for Human Oocytes
Debora Spar, Ph.D.
New England Journal of Medicine
March 29, 2007

Why should young women — most of whom have not yet used their eggs to produce their own children and nearly all of whom have no chance of benefiting directly from the research — be expected to volunteer? And why should they categorically be denied any form of payment?

A Place to Turn When a Newborn Is Fated to Die
By NEELA BANERJEE
Families whose babies suffer from fatal conditions are turning to specialized hospice programs for help.

Palliative Care Ethics Center
The Oklahoma Palliative Care Resource Center is launching a new resource for health care professionals. The "ethics" page will host questions, commentary, and discussion of issues raised by physicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains and other professionals working with palliatiave care or patients facing end-of-life decisions. If you have questions, contact us: ok-palliative@ouhsc.edu

Civil Rights Lawsuit Against Doctors for Death of Child
A civil rights lawsuit has been filed against doctors at the Medical University of South Carolina who allegedly removed a two-month-old child from life support. In Hernandez v. Abel et al, No. 2:06-cv-02582-DCN (D.S.C. filed Sept. 18, 2006), Ramon Hernandez, charged with homicide of his daughter, Judith Hernandez, claims that he was deprived of his constitutional rights after the child was removed from life support on September 5. In late August, a hearing was held in Family Court to determine whether the South Carolina Department of social Services should be appointed guardian for the child. At that time, a doctor testified that the child had shown no signs of life since she had been brought into the hospital more than thirty days earlier. Prior to the court issuing a ruling, the child died. Both Hernandez and the child’s mother, Yuribel Najara, have been indicted on charges that their actions led to their daughter’s death.

Pain Management Report Card Gives Oklahoma a "C+"
The University of Wisconsin Pail & Policy Studies Group (PPSG) has released its new report, “Achieving Balance in State Pain Policy: A Progress Report Card (Second Edition).” The report, funded by the American Cancer Society, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, found that states are making steady progress in adopting effective policies that help alleviating pain in their citizens. Two states, Virginia and Michigan, achieved an “A” grade. The complete report, along with an accompanying “Achieving Balance in Federal and State Pain Policy: A Guide to Evaluation (Third Edition),” are available on the PPSG’s website.

Do Alzheimer's Patients Feel Pain?
The Journal Brain published an article detailing research conducted in Australia among patients suffering from dementia. It showed that Alzheimer’s sufferers feel pain like everyone else but are given fewer pain killing drugs because they are not likely to report pain.

End-of-Life in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit
The September issue of Pediatrics contains an article titled “Matters of Spirituality at the End of Life in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.” Examining the answers to a survey of families whose children had died in pediatric ICUs, the researchers noticed that four explicitly religious themes emerged. These were prayer, faith, access to and care from clergy, and belief in the transcendent quality of the parent-child relationship that endures beyond death. The research also noted that parents may be reluctant to share their faith perspective with health care providers for fear that their spirituality may be misunderstood or judged.

Soldiers Need Advance Care Planning
USA Today reported a concern raised in a symposium this summer sponsored by the Army’s Wounded Warrior Program as to whether emergency physicians acting as initial responders should have access to living wills or DNR orders. Wounded soldiers and families of casualties noted that at least 250 soldiers have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq with severe head wounds that left them, at least initially, comatose or unable to respond to people.

New Website for Aging
The National Association of Area Agencies on the Agency has published on its website a report titled “The Maturing of America — Getting Communities on Track for an Aging Population.” The report demonstrates that less than half of the nation’s communities have begun to prepare to deal with the needs of the elderly.

Law Blog: Sensitive Medical-Legal Issue: Louisiana AG Arrests Doctor ...

End-of-Life Care for Children
Marcellius "Celli" Sears, 7, is cared for by the pediatric palliative care team at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where he is awaiting a lung transplant. Click here for more information.

NEW BOOK!
Unplugged: Reclaiming Our Right to Die in America. See the first reviews.

Click here for latest worldwide palliative care NEWS! News and Events

The arrest of a doctor and two nurses Tuesday on charges that they administered lethal drug doses to severely ill New Orleans hospital patients during the desperately worsening conditions after Hurricane Katrina raises ethical questions about what medical personnel can and cannot do in similar life-threatening emergencies. Tribune science reporter, Published July 19, 2006

Home Care for Kids
SickKids award helps keep tots out of hospital. Click here for more information.

AHRQ Launches New Web-based Tool for States to Measure Quality Performance
AHRQ today released a new interactive Web-based tool for States to use in measuring health care quality at a press conference at the Association of Health Care Journalists meeting in Houston, TX. The new State SnapshotWeb tool is based on the 2005 National Healthcare Quality Report and 2005 National Healthcare Disparities Report, released January 9, and provides quick and easy access to the many measures and tables of the quality report from each State's perspective. Select to view the State Snapshot tool. The 2005 National Healthcare Quality Report and the 2005 National Healthcare Disparities Report are available online at AHRQ's Qualitytools. Print copies of the reports are available by sending an e-mail to AHRQPubs@ahrq.hhs.gov. In addition, we have posted an audio Newscast about the State Snapshot tool. The newscast features an interview with AHRQ Director Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D., discussing the importance of the tool and its key elements. In addition, AHRQ's Dr. Dwight McNeill explains how to use some of the tool's features. Select to listen to the program.

End-of-Life Care for Late-Stage Alzheimer's Patients by Betty Garrett Wood, JD
Four million Americans, including approximately 70,000 Oklahomans, have Alzheimer's disease or a related dementia. One in ten persons over the age of 65 years and one in two persons over the age of 85 years have Alzheimer's. The longer a person lives, the higher the chances of developing Alzheimer's. As Oklahoma's population ages, the number of Oklahomans with Alzheimer's is projected to grow to 100,000 by 2025. By 14 to 16 million Americans are anticipated to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, unless a cure is found soon. Click here for more information.

The Joan E. Matzo Comfort Shawl Project
Combining the love of knitting and crocheting into helpful work that reaches out to those in need of comfort and solace at times of loss or illness. Click here to download the brochure.

Medicaid Consumer Information Fact Sheet
The American Health Lawyers Association has released a Medicaid Consumer Information Fact Sheet. 

Book Review
 Poet, memoirist, and literary scholar Sandra Gilbert  has written Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Way We Grieve - A Cultural Study. This penetrating book asks how our experiences of death and grief have changed over a century that included the collective traumas of Hiroshima and the Holocaust. Do current events such as the 9/11 attack condition us to view mortality and mourning differently, or does our relationship to death remain constant over time?

The proceedings of the National Institutes of Health’s “State-of-the-Science on Improving End-of-Life Care” have been published in a special supplement of the Journal of Palliative Medicine.  The conference, held in December 2004, brought together prominent professionals with expertise in a broad range of topics related to end-of-life care.

The American Health Lawyers Association has issued a free guide to legal issues in life-limiting conditions.AHLA has released A Guide to Legal Issues in Life-Limiting Conditions. The document was produced as part of AHLA's public interest commitment to serve as a public resource on selected healthcare legal issues.

A Legal Guide to Life-Limiting Conditions provides an overview of the key legal and practical issues that arise in the care of individuals who face a life-limiting condition or who care for a loved one with a life-limiting condition. As an aid to the planning process, the Guide is organized around the continuum of care, beginning with healthy individuals who are able to live at home and following the continuum to independent retirement communities, assisted living, long term care, and an eventual return to the home with the aid of hospice services.

Dr. Ira Byock, one of the foremost experts on caring for those at the end of life, endorsed the Guide for many different audiences: "This Guide deserves a place on the desk of any attorney, physician, nurse, case manager, or social worker who helps elderly or ill clients think about and plan for the future. It sits on mine."

An article in the January 29 issue of the Hartford Courant spoke of the apparent gap between African Americans and white Americans in talking about end-of-life options, noting particularly the reluctance of many African Americans to choose hospice care.

Two nurses offer their top tips for palliative care nurses in Medical News Today.  These are: 

1. Set up routine processes and algorithms so nurses can more easily make decisions about treating immediate patient needs
2. Create a culture of flexibility and responsiveness to patient needs
3. Think beyond hospital walls to the broader continuum of care
4. Build in a support structure of nursing staff to prevent burnout.

An article in the February 19 issue of Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal emphasizes that honesty is imperative when a family must tell a child and his siblings that he is dying of cancer.

The National Senior Citizens Law Center has published a booklet, “20 Common Nursing Homes Problems — and How to Resolve Them.”  The booklet suggests that “residents and their families develop a healthy sense of entitlement to high-quality nursing home care.”

Consumer’s Tool Kit for Health Care Advance Planning
Good advance planning for health care decisions is, in reality, a continuing conversation - about values, priorities, the meaning of one's life, and quality of life. To help you in this process, the American Bar Association has created atool kit with  a variety of self-help worksheets, suggestions, and resources. There are 10 tools in all, each clearly labeled and user-friendly. The tool kit does not create a formal advance directive for you. Instead, it helps you do the much harder job of discovering, clarifying, and communicating what is important to you in the face of serious illness. http://www.abanet.org/aging/toolkit/home.html

A January 29 article in the Washington Post quoted Senator Majority leader Bill Frist on NBC’s “Meet the Press” as saying he learned from the Terry Schiavo case that Americans generally do not want the government involved in end-of-life decisions.

[back to top]