Ethics, Law and Health Care

Book excerpt: Understanding ethics and law in health care is an essential part of nurse and midwife professional standards, and a core component of qualifying programmes. Ethics, Law and Health Care teaches applied ethics and law in a way that illustrates the real world applications of these essential aspects of practice. It enables readers to not only recognise but also address legal and ethical issues that will arise in their professional practice. The book approaches these issues using the Nursing and Midwifery Codes of Ethics, the Codes of Professional Conduct and the four principles of biomedical ethics: Autonomy Non-maleficence Beneficence Justice Filled with case studies, review questions and useful further reading, this book gives readers a solid understanding of ethics and law in health care, and a clear decision-making framework so they can take action confidently.Chapter 1: Ethics and Law.- Chapter 2: Ethics and ethical and legal decision- making frameworks.- Chapter 3: The Australian legal system.- Chapter 4: Ethics, law and nursing and midwifery practice.- Chapter 5: Adult patients - Consent and refusal of consent.- Chapter 6: Children as patients.- Chapter 7 Law, ethics and health information management.- Chapter 8: Patient safety and negligence.- Chapter 9: Ethics, law and mental health.- Chapter 10: Ethics, law and the elderly.- Chapter 11: End-of-life issues.- Chapter 12: Issues relevant to reproduction, pregnancy and the birth of a child.- Chapter 13: Ethics, law and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients Appendixes.- Code of conduct for nurses.- Code of conduct for midwives.- Where to find the International Council of Nurses Code of Ethics and the International Confederation of Midwives Code of Ethics.