General course reflection

You, the student

• Are you an engaged learner? 
• Reflect on your experience in this class.  How can you be a more active participant in class? 
• What are you learning about yourself as a student?  Are you willing to work hard at your studies?  What if you won’t be directly rewarded by that work?

Learning across disciplines

• Reflect on your experiences in other classes this term.  How are your current classes (and ones from the past) combining?  What are you learning from the intersections of those disciplines?

Generally 

• why are you in school?  Specifically, why are you in this class?

Who is the unit of care?

Is it the patient herself?  The family + patient?  What does "family" mean?

Hospice Care

What is hospice care?  What must happen in order for a patient to enter hospice care?  What services does hospice offer to a patient? 

Hospice sees family + patient as the unit of care.  Please comment on the value/wisdom/difficulty of such an orientation.

Futile Treatment

What is futile treatment?  How is it defined?  How do we know when a treatment is futile? Who gets to make that decision?

Does a patient have the *right* to any care?  Does a patient have the right to futile treatment?
Relatedly, should a doctor/medical professional/medical team be able to refuse to treat a patient, if there is no effective treatment (meaning only futile) to offer.

To complicate these questions, please think very hard about what counts as "treatment" and what medical staff can offer to patients even if there isn't curative or interventionist treatment to offer.  This will relate to another post on hospice care.

Rights

We've talked about positive (welfare) and negative (barrier) rights.  Is PAS more like a positive right or a negative right?  OR, if you think it isn't a right at all, explain.