Goldman Sachs, Corporate Culture, and Medical Ethics

When Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, and head of the firm's US equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle Eas...

Hand Washing,Teamwork, and Professional Ideals

Hand washing protects hospital patients from healthcare-associated infections. But on average, adherence to hand hygeine standards is under ...

The Looming Epidemic of Safety Net Hospital Dialysis Program Closures

I've done three recent posts on the crisis at Grady Hospital in Atlanta that has led to closure of its dialysis program. (See here , her...

Tragic Choices at Grady Hospital (3) - Brinksmanship with Human Lives

Grady Hospital has done the right thing, as I predicted it would in a post last week ( here ): Clearly, a safety net provider is accountable...

Tragic Choices at Grady Hospital

On October 3, Grady Hospital in Atlanta closed its dialysis clinic. Grady committed itself to cover the cost of dialysis for three months fo...

Medical Culture and Costs at UCLA

An article about the cost of end-of-life care in this morning's New York Times focuses on the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. UCLA ha...

Patient Safety, Ethics, and Psychiatry

This fall I was asked to discuss a case for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Mortality and Morbidity Rounds - a web-based pati...

Problems for Medicine as a Self-Regulating Profession

Professions are occupations that society believes (a) serve vital human needs, (b) require a high level of knowledge, judgment and skill, (c...

A Practical Approach to Organizational Ethics

I've been meeting with a number of organizations to help them develop new ways to deal with the ethical dimensions of their activities. ...

Shamans, Placebos and Multicultural Ethics

Over coffee I read in this morning's New York Times about how Mercy Medical Center , an acute care hospital in Merced, California, allo...

Medicare Open to All (3)

President Obama's lobbying efforts with governors may be smart politics, but they show the sad state of ethical discourse with regard to...

Creating a Culture of Research

I recently came upon a terrific article - "Creating a Culture of Research" - that lays out a strategy aimed at making it easier t...

Ethics at the Swami Vivekananda Hospital

I'm in Mysore, in the South Indian state of Karnataka, for eight days, at the Vivekananda Institute of Indian Studies. The Institute is ...

Hatred of Insurance Companies

The Obama transition team is sponsoring 4,200 house party-based grass roots discussions of health care in December. Today's New York Tim...

Mayo Clinic Skipped Written Informed Consent - Bravo!

A headline caught my eye this morning - "Mayo Skipped Written Consent." Before I say more I have to acknowledge a conflict of int...

Hospital Branding, Money, and Ethics

A recent article by the Boston Globe investigative "Spotlight Team" about the differential payments Partners Health Care receives...

Hospitals, Ethics, and the Uninsured

Three cheers for print journalism! For a rich understanding of the human impact of not having health insurance, look at the superb (but long...

Hospital Ethics

On reason "ethics" has a bad name is the gap between espoused principles and the behavior of individuals and organizations. Highfa...

Immigrants, Refugees, and Medical Ethics

After I wrote yesterday's post about refugees and asylum seekers in the British National Health Service, I read a remarkable article in...

Hospital Organizational Ethics

The Journal of Medical Ethics recently published an interesting study from the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics - "Cli...