Autor: Quill, Timothy; Miller, Franklin
Palliative Care and Ethics
1st Edition 2014, 336 p.

About the book

Provides more in depth ethical palliative care exploration of many subjects than any past books in this field (health care reform, children, interdisciplinary team, advance care planning, depression, multiple last resort option)
Many chapter positions will be subject to controversy (depression, advance care planning, sedation, physician assisted death)
Marks 25th anniversary of palliative medicine as a formal medical field (and about 50 year anniversary of hospice)
Hospice is the premiere end of life program in the United States, but its requirement that patients forgo disease-directed therapies and that they have a prognosis of 6 months or less means that it serves less than half of dying patients and often for very short periods of time. Palliative care offers careful attention to pain and symptom management, added support for patients and families, and assistance with difficult medical decision making alongside any and all desired medical treatments, but it does not include a comprehensive system of care as is provided by hospice. The practice of palliative care and hospice is filled with sometimes overt (requests for hastened death in an environment where such acts are legally prohibited) and other times covert (the delay in palliative care referral because the health care team believes it will undermine disease directed treatment) ethical issues. 

The contributors to this volume use a series of case presentations within each chapter to illustrate some of the palliative care and hospice challenges with significant ethical dimensions across the three overarching domains: 1) care delivery systems; 2) addressing the many dimensions of suffering; and 3) difficult decisions near the end of life. The contributors are among the most experienced palliative care, hospice and ethics scholars in North America and Western Europe. Each has been given relatively free reign to address what they feel are the most pressing ethical challenges within their domain, so a wide range of positions and vantage points are represented. As a result, the volume provides a very diverse ethical exploration of this relatively young field that can deepen, stretch, and at times confront any simple notion of the challenges facing patients, their families, professional caregivers, and policy makers.
Readership: · Hospice providers/patients/families · Palliative care providers / patients / families · Ethicists · Nurses, social workers, doctors, chaplains · Medical, nursing, social work trainees · Thanatologists, Hemlock Society Members · Social scientists · Palliative care and hospice patients/families · Bereaved families · Seriously ill patients