Tuesday 12 April 2016

New paper online: Ethical Hazards in Monitoring and Addressing Patient Decision Capacity in Clinical Practice

Just a little heads-up about a new research paper now being online (free to read and download). This one is lead by my Ph.D. student, Thomas Hartvigsson (presently visiting at Queen's University, Canada) and addresses aspects of his thesis topic about the normative roles of decision competence, for instance, in areas such as law or health care.

Together with Gun Forsander, chief senior clinical consultant at a childhood diabetes clinic, we use studies made in the area of teenage diabetes care, to argue that patient educational interventions meant to monitor and promote patients' intellectual understanding of general facts about their disease and the treatment brings ethical hazards likely to undermine some patient's decision-making capacities rather than enhancing or safeguarding them. At the same time, we find a strong general case for the idea of monitoring and addressing decision competence in patient groups where there is good reason to suspect especially fragile decision capacities, and sketch some challenges regarding staff competence and care organisation related to that.

The paper is freely available online for reading and download here.