Legal and Ethical Issues for Health Professionals is an important and practical guide to aide in the resolution of ethical dilemmas with legal implications. This comprehensive reference provides both the student and practicing health care professional with an overview of the ethical and legal issues that face healthcare providers today. The reader will better understand ethical dilemmas and learn how to evaluate and distinguish between the rightness and wrongness of alternative courses of action when faced with complicated problems to solve. From the Preface: Legal and Ethical Issues for Health Professionals is a comprehensive reference to the questions of right and wrong for the student and practicing health professional. This text will provide the reader with a strong foundation to build upon to help in the understanding of ethical dilemmas. The reader will learn how to evaluate and determine the rightness or wrongness of alternative courses of action when things are just not always what they seem. Ethics in the health care setting is about doing the right thing. It involves recognizing ethical dilemmas and appropriately addressing them. The purpose of this text is to provide both the student and practicing health care professional with an overview of the ethical and legal issues that face healthcare providers. The text: presents ethical and legal concepts in an easily understood format; reviews the basic principles of ethics and the law; provides insight into how ethics and the law are intertwined; provides an understanding as to how both ethics and the law permeate every aspect of the decision-making process in the health care setting; presents case studies to illustrate real life issues; guides students and caregivers to resources to help them practice more effectively within the boundaries of ethical principles and applicable laws; explores the use of ethics and the law to assist caregivers in resolving ethical conflicts and dilemmas; and, reviews an organization's boundaries as to what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior. This book starts with the premise that to act in an ethical manner, means to engage in conduct according to the acceptable principles of right and wrong. The author's objective is to provide the reader with the background knowledge necessary to understand that ethics is a manner of using integrity based decisions in order to determine what actions need to be taken when faced with common health care dilemmas.