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Randi Zlotnik Shaul

Publications and source records attributed to Randi Zlotnik Shaul.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

On pandemics and the duty to care: whose duty? who cares?

BACKGROUND: As a number of commentators have noted, SARS exposed the vulnerabilities of our health care systems and governance structures. Health care professionals (HCPs) and hospital systems that bore the brunt of the SARS outbreak continue to struggle with the aftermath of the crisis. Indeed, HCPs - both in clinical care and in public health - were severely tested by SARS. Unprecedented demands were placed on their skills and expertise, and their personal commitment to their profession was severely tried. Many were exposed to serious risk of morbidity and mortality, as evidenced by the World Health Organization figures showing that approximately 30% of reported cases were among HCPs, some of whom died from the infection. Despite this challenge, professional codes of ethics are silent on the issue of duty to care during communicable disease outbreaks, thus providing no guidance on what is expected of HCPs or how they ought to approach their duty to care in the face of risk. DISCUSSION: In the aftermath of SARS and with the spectre of a pandemic avian influenza, it is imperative that we (re)consider the obligations of HCPs for patients with severe infectious diseases, particularly diseases that pose risks to those providing care. It is of pressing importance that organizations representing HCPs give clear indication of what standard of care is expected of their members in the event of a pandemic. In this paper, we address the issue of special obligations of HCPs during an infectious disease outbreak. We argue that there is a pressing need to clarify the rights and responsibilities of HCPs in the current context of pandemic flu preparedness, and that these rights and responsibilities ought to be codified in professional codes of ethics. Finally, we present a brief historical accounting of the treatment of the duty to care in professional health care codes of ethics. SUMMARY: An honest and critical examination of the role of HCPs during communicable disease outbreaks is needed in order to provide guidelines regarding professional rights and responsibilities, as well as ethical duties and obligations. With this paper, we hope to open the social dialogue and advance the public debate on this increasingly urgent issue.

Codes of Ethics↗
PubMed2006

Medical records and women's self-report are not reliable sources for determining whether prenatal HIV testing was done.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether medical records and the self-report of a postpartum patient provide reliable information about whether or not prenatal HIV testing has been done. METHODS: Women on the postpartum wards at three Toronto teaching hospitals who gave informed consent were included in the study. The presence or absence of prenatal HIV testing was determined by interviews with postpartum women, review of hospital charts, and search of the Public Health Provincial Laboratory and Prenatal Testing databases. RESULTS: Two hundred ninety-nine women were enrolled. All had had at least one prenatal visit, and 92% had copies of prenatal records in their hospital charts. Health records and patient reports were both unreliable for determining who had and who had not had HIV testing. HIV status was documented on 55% of the charts; on 46% it was noted that testing was performed, and on 46% there was documentation of pre& or post&test counselling. In interviews, 73% of the women reported having an HIV test during this pregnancy. Using the laboratory databases as the gold standard of whether testing had truly been done, medical record sensitivity and specificity were 65% and 62% respectively, and self-report sensitivity and specificity were 87% and 52% respectively. Using medical records resulted in an underestimation and self-reports an overestimation of the number of women who had been tested. CONCLUSIONS: Both medical records and patient self-report are unreliable at the time of labour and delivery for determining whether or not a woman has been tested for HIV in pregnancy. Clinical and public health decisions may therefore be compromised by a lack of accurate testing information at the bedside.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Legal liabilities in research: early lessons from North America.

The legal risks associated with health research involving human subjects have been highlighted recently by a number of lawsuits launched against those involved in conducting and evaluating the research. Some of these cases have been fully addressed by the legal system, resulting in judgments that provide some guidance. The vast majority of cases have either settled before going to trial, or have not yet been addressed by the courts, leaving us to wonder what might have been and what guidance future cases may bring. What is striking about the lawsuits that have been commenced is the broad range of individuals/institutions that are named as defendants and the broad range of allegations that are made. The research community should take this early experience as a warning and should reflect carefully on practices where research involving human subjects is concerned.

Clinical Trials as Topic↗
PubMed2005

Potāto, potăto, proxy consent, permission -- just don't call the a whole thing off.

Research involving critically ill persons highlights challenging questions surrounding third party authorization. The ethical and legal viability in research involving persons who do not have the capacity to consent to participation is not universally accepted, and inconsistent standards are reflected in research ethics guidelines, law and practice. In order to ensure that research participants who are considered incapable of consenting to research are appropriately protected, and that minimal risk research on illnesses affecting those who are unable to consent is enabled, clear and justifiable parameters must be created and, where they are already established, they must be made more transparent.

Critical Illness↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Dissemination to research subjects: operationalizing investigator accountability.

Recent articles have argued from principles of bioethics for the right of research subjects to receive the results of the studies in which they have participated. We argue that accountability is a powerful tool of meso-level analysis appropriate to reasoning about answerability in research ethics, and that it captures the responsibility of researchers to disseminate study results to research subjects. We offer the following features of the research situation as relevant to the manner of dissemination to study subject, in addition to factors already proposed in the literature (risk and impact on health outcome): (a) features of the research subject in relation to identity, personal investment, disease, and community; (b) characteristics of the research study and field of inquiry in relation to certainty and significance; and (c) relationships among the research subjects and the healthcare workers involved in their care and in the research.

Access to Information↗