Register for email alerts and news feeds:
This journal | BMJ Group
rss
Postgraduate Medical Journal 2001;77:388-389; doi:10.1136/pmj.77.908.388
© 2001 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd and The Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine.
Postgrad Med J 2001;77:388-389 ( June )

Review

Ethical, professional, and legal obligations in clinical practice: a series of discussion topics for postgraduate medical education Topic 3: resuscitation decisions in adult patients

D M Gore

Craigavon Area Hospital, Northern Ireland

Correspondence to: Mr D M Gore, Department of Surgery, University of Liverpool, 5th Floor UCD Building, Daulby Street, Liverpool L69 3GA, UK dmgore@liverpool.ac.uk

Submitted 24 May 2000; Accepted 2 August 2000

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

    Introduction

This is the third discussion topic in a series of five dealing with ethical, professional, and legal obligations of clinical practice. Junior doctors tend to lack confidence in these subjects, and thus I organised a series of informal discussions in our surgical unit on which these articles are based. The sessions were prepared with reference to non-academic literature readily available from the General Medical Council and the medical defence organisations. While our unit dealt with these issues from a surgical perspective, the obligations of clinical practice apply to all practitioners, and the series could be easily modified for other clinical specialties.

Closed chest resuscitation for cardiopulmonary arrest was pioneered in the 1960s and a crash team is now a standard feature of UK acute hospitals.1 Different series report survival rates ranging from 5%-20%. A "not for resuscitation" (NFR) decision indicates that an elective decision has been made not to call . . . [Full text of this article]


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

  • Gorton, A J, Jayanthi, N V G, Lepping, P, Scriven, M W (2008). Patients' attitudes towards "do not attempt resuscitation" status. J. Med. Ethics 34: 624-626 [Abstract] [Full Text]  
  • Jain, A K, Chattopadhyay, I, Kallat, A (2002). Ethical, professional, and legal obligations in clinical practice Author's reply. Postgrad. Med. J. 78: 61-62 [Full Text]  

This Article

Services
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Bookmark with

Register for free content

The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.

Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.