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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
COVID-19 Underscores Racial Disparity in Advance Directives (The Hastings Center)
Conversations about advance directives are important to ensure dignity in life and in death. In one nationally representative survey, however, older black Americans were half as likely as older whites to have advance directives.
Read Article »Questions of Bias in COVID-19 Treatment Add to the Mourning for Black Families (The New York Times)
The coronavirus has left tens of thousands of grief-stricken American families struggling to make sense of the seemingly random terror it inflicts, sickening many but only taking some lives. But for many black families, mourning coronavirus deaths brings an added burden as they wonder whether racial bias may have played a role.
Read Article »COVID Tells Us to Have “The Conversation” Now (KevinMD)
In the current pandemic, it’s not something you can put off any longer. Now, more than ever, you need to have multiple conversations. Why? It helps normalize the topic.
Read Article »Sustaining Clinical Empathy During the Pandemic (The Hastings Center)
As Covid-19 continues to spread throughout the United States, doctors, nurses, and other clinicians are facing unmistakable tragedies. But something less perceptible is afoot. Empathy in medicine is under siege.
Read Article »Unblinded: Systematic Racism, Institutional Oppression, and Colorblindness (Bioethics.net)
The data are clear: African Americans are becoming infected with the novel coronavirus and dying at a higher rate than White Americans. The rationale is clear: African Americans have higher rates of comorbid conditions than White Americans. The reason is clear: over 400 years of systematic racism, institutional oppression, and continued colorblindness have lead to this outcome.
Read Article »Free Public Information Sessions About Advance Directives
Every Wednesday from 10-11 am, beginning May 6, Brattleboro Area Hospice’s Taking Steps Brattleboro program will host an Advance Care Planning/Advance Directive Question and Answer Information Session via Zoom.
Learn More »Immigrants, Health Inequities, and Social Citizenship in Covid-19 Response and Recovery (The Hastings Center)
The novel coronavirus pandemic has starkly revealed the vulnerabilities of low-wage immigrants, immigrant-led households, and immigrant communities to coronavirus infection, severe Covid-19 illness, and economic fallout from pandemic.
Read Article »Denying Ventilators to COVID-19 Patients with Prior DNR Orders is Unethical (The Hastings Center)
When deciding which patients with Covid-19 should get scarce ventilators, should hospitals consider a person’s DNR status – the previously stated wish not to receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to restart the heart and breathing after cardiac arrest?
Read Article »Structural Racism, White Fragility, and Ventilator Rationing Policies (The Hastings Center)
It’s been painful to watch health leaders twist themselves into moral knots denying that recently created ventilator rationing guidance will differentially affect Blacks, Latinx, and other people of color. On television, in newspapers, and on listservs, when the predicted disproportionate impacts of these policies are raised, some bioethicists-often white, stonewall.
Read Article »Ethics and Evidence in the Search for a Vaccine and Treatments for COVID-19 (The Hastings Center)
In the rush to find a Covid-19 vaccine and one or more drugs to treat the deadly disease, concerns are being raised that ethical standards for conducting human clinical trials, and the evidentiary standards for determining whether interventions are safe and effective, might be loosened.
Read Article »The Way We Ration Ventilators Is Biased (The New York Times)
Rationing ventilators might be a necessary response in the new Covid-19 world. Many hospitals decide who gets them by selecting patients most likely to benefit. Experts agree this is the best way of saving most lives. The approach, the model guidance, may sound fair. But baked into it are biases that disadvantage groups who, even without a Covid-19 infection, experience worse health because of historical and structural reasons, especially black people.
Read Article »On Being an Elder in a Pandemic (The Hastings Center)
Do the elderly have special obligations during a pandemic, that is, something more than the duty we all have for hand washing, social distancing, timely self-quarantining, and most recently, wearing a face mask?
Read Article »Fair Coronavirus Triage Guidelines – Not Business as Usual – Will Save More Patients with Disabilities (The Denver Post)
In recent weeks, some disability advocates have objected to triage policies. These critics argue that people with disabilities are likely to get lower priority under triage policies. They worry that doctors will judge disabled people as having a lower quality of life and so as less deserving of being saved, and that disabled people who need more medical assistance will be excluded.
Read Article »NY State Task Force on Life and the Law Ventilator Allocation Guidelines: How Our Views on Disability Evolved (The Hastings Center)
The journey the task force took in its thinking from early drafts to its final 2015 report was a salubrious one. It shows that people of good faith can evolve in their thinking about fairness, justness, and disability, especially when cajoled by passionate scholars...
Read Article »Why I Support Age-Related Rationing of Ventilators for Covid-19 Patients (The Hastings Center)
As a 71-year-old bioethicist, I recently drew up an advance directive specifically for the possibility that I might have to go to the hospital with Covid-19, and I am writing this essay to explain why I consider rationing mechanical ventilation based on age to be one morally relevant criterion.
Read Article »Moral Guidance on Prioritizing Care During a Pandemic (Public Discourse)
In the next few weeks, as the pandemic perhaps reaches its zenith, we will have the opportunity to decide once again what sort of society we intend to be. We should eschew all invidious discrimination and recommit ourselves to treating all who are ill as bearers of profound, inherent, and equal worth and dignity.
Read Article »Postponed: VEN Spring Palliative Care Conference (May 18)
VEN's Spring Conference, "Informed Consent: More Than a Piece of Paper", has been postponed until the fall.
Learn More »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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