General Principles This document sets forth general principles and attempts to help people advocate for themselves and their loved ones. Patients and their families are in the best position to determine to what degree this advice pertains to them and can assist them in advocating for their loved ones. What is contained in this document is not legal …
EFFECTIVELY NAVIGATING HOSPITALS WHEN ADVOCATING FOR A LOVED ONE Read More »
The items in this plan of action are always necessary but have become an urgent need during our current time of crisis. The crises resulting from Covid-19 are grave. These have included the sickness and death caused by the virus itself, overreach by healthcare officials in not allowing visitation of seriously ill and dying loved …
SPIRITUAL PROTOCOL FOR DIVINE ASSISTANCE AND TIMELY HELP Read More »
Statement of the Healthcare Civil Rights Task Force Parents have always been responsible for raising, caring for, and loving their children. The duty of parents is to act in the best interests of their children, who have been entrusted to them by God. The family is foundational to the good of society. The family is the vehicle for God’s love to spread into …
THE MORAL IMPERATIVE TO RESTORE AND ADVANCE PARENTAL RIGHTS Read More »
Emily Cook, Texas Right to Life’s General Counsel, presents the three points you NEED to know about brain death diagnosis in Texas, including the three questions you ABSOLUTELY MUST ask the doctors caring for your loved one.
PATIENT ADVOCATES PUT COMPASSION INTO ACTION Visiting the sick is a work of mercy. Patient advocates manifest mercy by showing compassion to sick and suffering people. Compassion means “to suffer with” another, to put our kindly inclinations—which we are often tempted to resist—into action through readiness to assist. A person who accompanies a medically vulnerable …
PATIENT ADVOCATES ARE DESPERATELY NEEDED: PART II Read More »
Physical and cognitive disability should not mean one’s situation is considered “end of life,” yet too many persons who are not dying are described this way. Earlier this year, Oregon’s state legislature considered a bill that would have increased the number of medically vulnerable persons at risk of an untimely death. Oregon’s SB 494 would …
BASIC CARE, HUMAN DIGNITY, AND CARE FOR MEDICALLY VULNERABLE PERSONS Read More »
PATIENT ADVOCATES NURTURE HOPE I have served as a volunteer patient advocate for 35 years. The deepest kinds of suffering I encounter are profound unhappiness and loneliness, resulting in loss of hope. It is difficult for people who are intensely unhappy to believe that they will ever be happy again. That is when they desperately …
PATIENT ADVOCATES ARE DESPERATELY NEEDED: PART I Read More »
The difference between the Catholic perspective on the dignity and rights of human persons and those of many secular and liberal thinkers seems to be widening. The COVID-19 pandemic and recent events have only served to make the contrast even more stark between truly Catholic health care and other visions of public health or medicine. …
IN CATHOLIC BIOETHICS ALL HUMAN LIVES ARE PRECIOUS Read More »