This comprehensive and much-needed resource helps health care ethicists to meet the demand of challenges such as managed care, medical technology, and patient activism. Through a review of core principles and a rich selection of cases, practitioners and students will learn to apply ethics in the day-to-day administration of health care organizations. The authors are from the Park Ridge Center, the nationally acclaimed consulting and research firm.

This book is about trust and its implications for a medical theological ethics. Beginning with its earliest work, there has been attention to trust running through the bioethics literature in the United States, and much of this discussion has examined its theological elements. Clearly, trust is indispensable when describing the patient-physician relationship, so why is there a need for yet another study? There is no doubt that people generally trust physicians. Traditionally the physician is the patient's fiduciary agent, whose sole obligation is to act only in the patient's best interest. In...