Patricia Illingsworth and Wendy E. Parmet. Upper Saddle River, NJ, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006. $65.00. ISBN 0-13-045301-3. 606 pp.
Ethical Healthcare provides an interdisciplinary contribution to the existing healthcare literature in the area of ethics. Although broad in scope, the book lacks the clinical focus that would be desired for a clinical nurse specialist or advanced practice nurse text. The book may be useful as an introductory text in an interdisciplinary healthcare ethics course.
The book presents a broadened perspective of bioethics by integrating social, economic, public policy, and legal influences on healthcare. It expands the horizons of bioethics by reconfiguring the discussion beyond the context of individual healthcare providers and their relationship to individual patients. The authors argue that the health of individuals is at least partially dependent on the health of communities and thus falls within the purview of public health. Although the far-reaching scope of the book emphasizes collaboration between disciplines-particularly law, medicine, and religion-the book fails to capture the nursing profession's unique scope of autonomous practice and significant contributions to ethical healthcare. That the 2 sections dedicated to nursing were written by non-nurse authors without nursing collaboration and supported by dated references (circa 1972-1984) further supports this argument.
The book is organized into 7 chapters starting with an overview of bioethics, including building blocks of health and ethical obligations of healthcare providers, institutions, individuals, society, and biomedical science. A major strength of the chapters is that they attempt to cover a broader scope than most other similar books. The major limitations of the book include the ambitious variety in the book chapters and editing inconsistencies (ie, citation format differences between chapters, lack of a consistent chapter template). These limitations result in a book that feels more like an amalgamation of individual articles than a textured and seamless whole. The scholarly writing style gives little emphasis to clinical application, making this book more useful for graduate didactic instruction than as a clinical reference guide. A faculty member using this text in an academic setting, however, may address this limitation by supplementing each chapter with interactive case studies or interdisciplinary field-based activities.