The development and pilot testing of the Professional Decisions and Values Test (PDV) is described. The PDV is designed to assess how ethical conflicts are dealt with by medical and law students and which moral values motivate them. Data from two consecutive classes of entering medical and law students are presented and their action tendencies and ethical values are compared. The findings support the construct validity of the test. Regarding reliability, stability over time is present for action tendencies but not for values. Perhaps the ethical values of entering medical and law students do not become stable until later. Change in ethical values can be studied with the PDV for groups, not individuals, during the first year of professional education.
In the United States we prize our freedom as individuals to make our own decisions, however unwise they might seem to others. This devotion to the principle of autonomy (from the Greek “autos” meaning self and “nomos” meaning rule) is obvious in our legal system as well as in a variety of social rules and customs that govern our daily lives.Difficulties arise, however, when we lose, either temporarily or permanently, the capacity to make our own decisions. Ideally we would have planned ahead for possible incapacity in order to retain control over the future course of our lives. Unfortunately the ideal situation rarely exists. Most of us avoid anticipating the possibility of our own incapacity, and by implication, loss of control. Until recently attention has not been paid to developing and supplying accessible and understandable information about advance directives that could assist us in such planning. And most of us still prefer (or at least resort to) informal, often uninformed, family decision-making arrangements.
Suicide among young people has become a growing concern in life in the 21st century and is a tragedy faced by an increasing number of families and in particular parents. This study set out to focus on the experiences of parents reentering the workplace following the death of a child by suicide. Although the immediate aftermath of experiencing traumatic death has been studied, we know less about the longer-term effects on life tasks such as returning to work. A sample of bereaved parents was interviewed and their responses thematically analyzed. The three major areas of experience related by parents were social and emotional aspects of readjusting to the workplace, followed by changes in cognitive, emotional and physical functioning and their changed attitudes toward work and life. Limitations of the study include the transferability of findings to other populations and to less close-knit cultures. The implications for employee adjustment and employers and co-workers' responses are considered. A fuller picture of adjustment might emerge from future studies that seek to document all parties' experiences during this period of transition.
Medical ethics committees are increasingly called on to assist doctors, patients, and families in resolving difficult ethics issues. Although committees are becoming more sophisticated in the substance of medical ethics, little attention has been given to the processes these committees use to facilitate decision-making. In 1990, the National Institute for Dispute Resolution in Washington, D.C., provided a planning grant from its Innovation Fund to the Institute of Public Law of the University of New Mexico School of Law to look at what ethics committees can learn from facilitation and mediation techniques. The study's thesis was that, if adapted for use by medical ethics committees, facilitation and mediation techniques can be helpful to those bodies in case review consultations and in other internal committee processes. This article reports on that project.
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