Coronavirus Update:
Ethics Considerations, Guidance and Resources.
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Forms
Forms
Tools to Document Health Care Decisions
Sudden illness or accident can happen to anyone at any time. These forms enable adults to appoint a health care agent and to document their priorities and preferences for future health care needs.
Medical Decision-Making
Medical Decision-Making
Taking Steps Vermont
There may come a time when you are unable to speak for yourself. The best way to ensure that your wishes are known and honored is to talk with those closest to you and your health care providers about what matters most.
Start Taking Steps TodayMedical Ethics
Medical Ethics
Relevant Topics in Bioethics
Medical ethics is a field of study that draws from philosophy, law and medicine. There are four core principles in bioethics that define the ethical obligations that health care providers owe to patients. The application of these principles to individual cases can be helpful in resolving difficult questions that arise in health care.
Learn MorePalliative & End-of-Life Care
Palliative & End-of-Life Care
Information for those living with serious illness
Palliative care is specialized care that is directed at managing the symptoms of those who are living with serious or advanced illness. It is appropriate for individuals who are seeking treatment for their disease, as well as for those who have shifted their goals to a more comfort-directed plan of care.
Learn MoreLatest News & Upcoming Events
Ethics Supports Seeking Population Immunity, Not Immunizing Priority Groups (The Hastings Center)
There have been some calls for a more pragmatic approach eschewing micromanaging distribution and instead focusing on speed and access. While there are indeed practical considerations supporting a more logistically streamlined system, we believe there are, more importantly, ethical reasons to prefer an approach that vaccinates more people more rapidly.
Read Article »Filing Suit for ‘Wrongful Life’ (The New York Times)
More Americans are writing end-of-life instructions as the pandemic renders such decisions less abstract. But are medical providers listening?
Read Article »What Is Death? How the Pandemic is Changing Our Understanding of Mortality (The New York Times)
This year has awakened us to the fact that we die. We’ve always known it to be true in a technical sense, but a pandemic demands that we internalize this understanding.
Read Article »Who Should Get the Vaccine Next? Not Just Seniors (The Hill)
There has been widespread agreement that health care workers and residents (and staff) of long-term care facilities should be at the very front of the line for the COVID-19 vaccine, and distribution to them is already underway. Now state and local officials will decide whether to adopt the recommendations of an expert panel on who goes next.
Read Article »Webinar on Advancing Social Justice, Health Equity and Community (Feb 9)
Join The Hastings Center on Tuesday, February 9 at 12pm Eastern for a free webinar exploring how thinking and insights afforded by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 20th century civil rights movement might help redress today's widespread suffering and health inequities.
Learn More & Register »Hospital Staff Revived a Man’s Stopped Heart — and He Sued (Boston Globe)
A successful ‘wrongful prolongation of life’ lawsuit in Montana, among other things, reflects the extent to which many Americans will go to gain — and enforce — their rights to control their final days.
Read Article »Coronavirus Mutation Panic (The Hastings Center)
An article offering insight on the new variant of the coronavirus circulating in England and key considerations that have been left out of the headlines.
Read Article »A Test for Ethics, Health, and Society (The Hastings Center)
In the early days of 2020, as news of a strange virus in Wuhan, China spread, it was The Hastings Center that provided an early preview of the challenges to come in a Bioethics Forum post by two Chinese physicians. As the virus swept throughout the world, the Center launched...
Read Article »What the Chaos in Hospitals Is Doing to Doctors (The Atlantic)
An article shedding light on the role and work of ethics committees and bioethicists, and the particularly challenging role they have played during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read Article »Some Lives Matter: The Dirty Little Secret of the U.S. Health Care System (Hastings Center Report)
Sickle cell disease afflicts about one hundred thousand Americans, the vast majority of whom are Black. It is a horrible disease that reduces life expectancy by about thirty years and can very adversely affect quality of life for the preceding forty years.
Read Article »Weekly Advance Care Planning Information Meetings via Zoom
Our colleagues at Taking Steps Brattleboro are offering free weekly Advance Care Planning Information Meetings via Zoom every Wednesday at 10am.
Learn More »Hastings Center President Speaks on Systemic Racism, Health Inequities, and Covid-19
In two recent talks, one at the National Institutes of Health and the other at the Washington-based Cosmos Club, Hastings Center president Mildred Solomon discussed the connection between systemic racism, other social determinants of health, and health inequities.
Read Article »Black Women Can't Breathe (The Hastings Center)
Years before George Floyd begged to be released from under the knee of Officer Derek Chauvin, Barbara Dawson, a 57-year-old Black woman, died begging a police officer, John Tadlock, not to remove her oxygen mask. Her death occurred right outside the Calhoun Liberty Hospital in Blountstown, Florida, shortly before Christmas in 2015.
Read Article »VEN Ethics Survey Results
View the results of our Ethics Survey for Vermont & New Hampshire conducted in the summer of 2019.
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