PSDA
Name
Institution
Date
PSDA (Patient Self-Determination Act)
Ethics committees in facilities are avenues of offering a path where dilemmas of health care can be discussed. There is a psychological aspect of diversity in patients, which can take dimensions like socio-cultural or religious. Patients’ frailty and age further complicate this dimension. These committees have respect for autonomy and fidelity as concerns the patient. It is in this regard that patients who may lack decision making capacity, then these dimensions are filled through ethics committees. Advance directives have the capacity to give support towards continuity of medical care to the patient after the transition from one type of caregiving (Grace, 2017).
Advance directives are formal statutory bindings, whether written or agreed upon orally, and they are supposed to guide patients regardless of their age and status of health. Without looking at their preferences of treatment and care goals, the document is there to give patients directions about their health (McMillan, 2019). Additionally, Advance directives give patients a chance to appoint somebody who can make decisions on their behalf when they lack the capacity to do so. In this way, ethics teams come in to direct all efforts towards respecting the goals of the patient and implement the requests of the patient whenever the patient is not in a position to do so by themselves. This means that an advance directive is never liable and cannot make a decision on a patient when they are able to. In a case where an emergency occurs and a patient is unable to make a treatment decision and a surrogate is missing, physicians are tasked with providing appropriate intervention within the shortest time possible to address the patients’ needs (McMillan, 2019).
References
Grace, P. J. (Ed.). (2017). Nursing ethics and professional responsibility in advanced practice. Jones & Bartlett Learning.
McMillan, S. S. (2019). The Role of Advanced Practice Nurses in Advanced Care Planning for Cancer Patients (Doctoral dissertation, Walden University).