Background: Older, frail patients with multimorbidity are at an especially high risk for disease severity and death from COVID-19. The social restrictions proved challenging for the residents, their relatives, and the care staff. While these restrictions clearly impacted daily life in Norwegian nursing homes, knowledge about how the pandemic influenced nursing practice is sparse. Aim: The aim of the study was to illuminate ethical difficult situations experienced by Norwegian nurses working in nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research design and (...) participants: The research design involved semistructured individual interviews conducted with 15 nurses working in 8 nursing homes in 3 health regions in Norway, within both urban and rural areas. Ethical considerations: Oral and written information about the study was provided before the participants gave their written consent. The transcribed interviews were de-identified. The study was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. Findings: Four ethical difficult situations were identified: (a) turning the nursing home into a prison; (b) using medication to maintain peace and order; (c) being left alone with the responsibility; and (d) s. impact on decision-making. Conclusions: The nurses’ ethical challenges were intertwined with external factors, such as national and local guidelines, and the nurses’ own internalized factors, which were connected to their subjective professionality. This duality inflicted emotional distress and gave nurses few opportunities to perform nursing in a professionally sound and safe manner. (shrink)

Over the course of an illustrious career, the late Bernard Diamond established himself as the preeminent forensic psychiatrist of the century. _The Psychiatrist in the Courtroom_ brings together in a single volume Diamond's pivotal contributions to a variety of important issues, including the nature of diminished capacity, the fallacy of the impartial expert, the predictability of dangerousness, and the unacceptability of hypnotically facilitated memory in courtroom proceedings. Ably introduced and edited by Jacques M. Quen, M.D., a close colleague of Diamond's (...) and leading historian of forensic psychiatry, these writings enable experts and neophytes alike to track Diamond's evolving positions while clarifying where current legal and psychiatric opinion converge -- and diverge -- on a host of critical topics. For the forensic specialist, _The Psychiatrist in the Courtroom_ is not only an invaluable reference work but a compassionate reminder of the clinician's obligation to protect patients in legal proceedings. And in an age when clinicians are increasingly called into court, the book will be no less valuable to psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals eager for an introduction to the intricacies of judicial reasoning. Then, too, owing to Diamond's clinical acumen, the book is a compelling human document. With great erudition and deep compassion, Diamond tackles these and other knotty questions, always with an eye to clarifying the legal and clinical implications of the answers. By combining superb clinical gifts with an incisive understanding of legal principle, Diamond produced a seminal corpus whose relevance to discussions of therapeutic ethics and to legal debates will continue well into the next century. (shrink)

With a 24-hour news cycle, the desperate need to attract viewers and increase revenue, and the pressure of being the first to print, news organizations have had to undergo a rapid evolution. Whether they've been able to maintain their integrity during this transition is a matter of debate. In this resource, a wide spectrum of contributors addresses the importance of journalistic ethics, the challenges journalists face today, and what's at stake for newspeople when charges of "fake news" are lobbed at (...) them. (shrink)