New Casebook: Caring For Older People in an Ageing Society

Last week I received an email from the Hastings Center with the subject line "What Do We Owe the Frail Elderly?"  This intrigued me because I often have a conversation with my students about what, if anything, we "owe" the generation before us. I typically have this conversation in the context of discussing funding of public benefits and other programs specifically for America's elders.   Here is the information about the casebook

A woman juggles caring for her aged father at home and going to work. A volunteer cares for an 83-year-old man who lives alone and wonders why the man’s son doesn’t take more of an interest. Staff members at a nursing home, discussing a patient with dementia who hits staff members, consider whether it’s acceptable to control his behavior with antipsychotic medication, knowing that antipsychotics increase the risk of stroke in people with dementia. These are three of the 10 cases in Caring for Older People in an Ageing Society, the second edition of an online bioethics casebook launched this week. The casebook aims to support professional and family caregivers by helping them recognize and respond to situations that pose ethical uncertainty... The bioethics casebook was the product of a project with the National University of Singapore Centre for Biomedical Ethics, The Hastings Center, and Oxford University’s Ethox Centre. Explore the Casebook. 

Additional information about the book is available from The Hastings Center website: "an innovative web-based casebook that focuses on ethical challenges of caring for people in an aging society. It is geared to those who provide community-based care to frail or chronically ill people living at home, in a family member’s home, or in a nursing home. The casebook will include fictional cases along with ethics commentaries, clinical perspectives, reflection and discussion questions, and other resources...."

This second volume of the casebook focuses on elders while the first volume focuses on difficult decisions. For more information, click here.