September 2, 2004 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Ethics of Hospital Trustees
edited by Bruce Jennings, Bradford H. Gray, Virginia A. Sharpe, and Alan R. Fleischman
This collection of essays discusses some of the ethical questions that confront board members of nonprofit hospitals. One such predicament, according to the editors, is how hospitals balance the competing goals of keeping their budgets in line and ensuring high-quality care in the face of rising health-care costs. The book is based in part on interviews with nearly 100 trustees and chief executives of hospitals, and several essays discuss how board members themselves view their ethical obligations.
One chapter provides an overview of the legal responsibilities of board members. It describes who has legal rights to sue a hospital and which types of lawsuits are likely to name trustees as defendants. It also covers the types of insurance available to protect board members and the limitations of those plans.
Other chapters focus on how trustees’ roles have changed over the past century, the responsibilities of board members at Catholic hospitals, and the tasks of trustees of hospitals that are considering converting to for-profit status, among other topics.
The collection was edited by Bruce Jennings, a senior research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, N.Y.; Bradford H. Gray, director of the division of health and science policy at the New York Academy of Medicine; Virginia A. Sharpe, director of the Integrity in Science project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, in Washington; and Alan R. Fleischman, senior vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine.
Publisher: Georgetown University Press, 3240 Prospect Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007; (202) 687-5889; fax (202) 687-6340; gupress@georgetown.edu; http://www.press.georgetown.edu; 292 pages; $64.95; I.S.B.N. 1-58901-015-9.
