By Amanda Ward There is ambiguity to what extent Welfare Powers of Attorney (WPA) in Scotland can refuse or withhold consent to medical treatment. The primary legislation to be consulted is the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 (AWIA). A welfare power of attorney relates to decision making in relation to the granter’s personal and […]
Category: consent
Compulsory treatment or vaccination versus quarantine
By Thomas Douglas, Jonathan Pugh and Lisa Forsberg. Governments worldwide have responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with sweeping constraints on freedom of movement, including various forms of isolation, quarantine, and ‘lockdown’. Governments have also introduced new legal instruments to guarantee the lawfulness of their measures. In the UK, the Coronavirus Act 2020 gives the government […]
Consent in the time of COVID-19
By Helen Turnham, Michael Dunn, Guy Thornburn, Elaine Hill, Dominic Wilkinson Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, one widely discussed issue has been the diversion of medical systems to support patients with acute COVID-19 disease. This diversion inevitably reduces availability of routine and urgent treatments for non-COVID-related illness. Patients with acute surgical emergencies such […]
Capacity-based decision-making for transgender adolescents
By Timothy F. Murphy This post is part of a series on ethical and legal perspectives in sexual and reproductive health first posted on the BMJ Sexual and Reproductive Health blog. Readers may be interested in the companion piece ‘Transgender children: limits on consent to permanent interventions’ by Heather Brunskell-Evans. Academics, clinicians, and trans people have focused […]
Transgender children: limits on consent to permanent interventions
By Heather Brunskell-Evans This post is part of a series on ethical and legal perspectives in sexual and reproductive health first posted on the BMJ Sexual and Reproductive Health blog. Be sure to check out the companion piece ‘Capacity-based decision-making for transgender adolescents’ by Timothy F. Murphy. When we talk about ‘transgender children’, we are referring […]
Using Ulysses Contracts to prevent patients from spiralling into relapse
By Harriet Standing Many people have written about Ulysses contracts in relation to the treatment of patients with mental illnesses. However, previous discussions have not focused on the particular phenomenon known as ‘spiralling’. The inspiration for this paper came from a friend with bipolar disorder. Over the years, they had suffered the relapsing and remitting […]
Limits of Informed Consent in United States Secondary Schools
By Nicholas Spangler & Zachary Winkelmann. The law for most US states require that individuals under the age of 18 must provide parental consent for medical services. For healthcare providers who work in secondary school settings, this would mean that every patient who walks in the door requesting services would need parental consent and child […]