Christine K. Cassel

Mathy Doval Mezey

Melissa M. Bottrell

Judith L. Howe

Kathryn Hyer

The delivery of good medical care often involves professionals from various disciplines working together. Interdisciplinary health care teams can be especially valuable in managing patients with complex medical and social needs, such as older persons in hospital, community, or home settings. Such teams, however, can also complicate or even create problems because of their diverse views and responsibilities. Ethical Patient Care: A Casebook for Geriatric Health Care Teams is designed to teach effective and responsible group decision making to clinicians working in teams to treat older patients. The editors use the case study method to present ethical dilemmas that team members encounter in the management of geriatric patients. Patients with multiple chronic conditions so often require the care of more than one medical specialist, and in the introductory chapters the editors suggest ways to resolve conflicts among patients, health care professionals, and the institutions that support them, including hospitals, HMOs, insurance companies, and the government. The book is then divided into four sections, each dealing with one angle of the team-care picture. The first section treats the diverse ethical imperatives of various professionals, conflicts among disciplinary approaches, and and varying attitudes toward end-of-life- decision making. Section two focuses on the patient and covers patient confidentiality, family decisionmaking and interaction with the healthcare team, issues of patient and team nonadherence to the care plan, and elder abuse and neglect. Section three examines the emerging difficulties of decentralized health care in settings such as hospitals, nursing homes, and the home, including clinician accountability and how ethical dilemmas differ across settings. Section four discusses the problems arising from the increasing responsibility of clinicians to manage costs and serve the interests of hospitals and insurers. Ethical Patient Care is a valuable resource for bioethicists, gerontologists, and the physicians, nurses, social workers, and therapists who care for aging persons.

A Casebook for Geriatric Health Care Teams

Ethical Patient Care

An authoritative, illustrated, practical guide explains the normal processes of aging, what medical problems are likely, how the law affects the elderly, and similar topics, and offers a comprehensive list of organizations that deal with aspects of aging. UP.

What Everyone Needs to Know

The Practical Guide to Aging

Diane E. Meier

Donald E. Riesenberg

Leif Sorensen

John R. Walsh

Reorganized into a single, tightly focused volume, the new edition of Geriatric Medicine offers practical, authoritative, and comprehensive coverage of the diseases, common problems, and medical care of older persons. The thorough revision includes new chapters on "Urinary Incontinence" and "Falls" as well as expanded discussions of rheumatic/orthopedic disorders and neuropsychological testing. Particularly noteworthy is the superb chapter on "Dementia"; written by a neurologist and a psychiatrist, it provides a remarkably complete account of the dementing disorders. The book also reviews central issues in health care systems and policies, including the unique legal aspects of caring for older persons and the rising importance of home care.

Geriatric Medicine

Harvey Jay Cohen

Eric B. Larson

Rosanne Leipzig

Since the publication of the third edition of Geriatric Medicine,extraordinary advances have occurred in the science of aging and the potential for biomedical research to give us answers to many, if not most, of the age-related disorders that threaten the quality of life in older years. At the most basic level, the successful mapping of the human genome was declared complete in the fall of 2000. Understanding the map of the human genome is as important as understanding the map of genomes of important laboratory species, ranging from the microscopic worms and fruit?ies used in most classic genetic studies to rodents such as laboratory mice, and eventually to primates, on which much of the research on the aging human brain is done. The genetic maps of all of these species,including our own,does not answer clinical questions,but it does open the door to dramatic, rapid, and ef?cient answers to questions about the genetic polymorphisms related to diseases in humans. The telomerase story also unfolded since the third edition. Telomerase is an enzyme responsible for maintaining the telomeres—the redundant DNA portions at the end of chromosomes—whose shortening seems to be linked directly to cell senescence,ap- tosis,and the control over cell death,which,at the level of the individual cell,seems to be linked to the decline of organ function and eventually aging and death within the org- ism.

An Evidence-Based Approach

Christine K. Cassel

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