Adult Protective Services: Convincing the Patient to Consent
- 1 September 1983
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Law, Medicine and Health Care
- Vol. 11 (4), 163-188
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-720x.1983.tb01732.x
Abstract
Adult protective service systems in many of our states have been subjected to a good deal of public criticism. Much of this denunciation, particularly that emanating from civil libertarians who advocate on behalf of the legal and ethical rights of older citizens, centers on the legal aspects of protective services, and especially on the legal authority of the state to intervene unilaterally in the private life of an unwilling, protesting older individual. Except in the most compelling of circumstances, society should avoid the coercive elements of protective services. Often overlooked, however, by commentators, policy-makers, and caregivers alike, is that protective services may be, and in the vast majority of instances are, accepted voluntarily (and gratefully) by the older recipient. A mentally competent individual may voluntarily give informed consent in the medical sphere, as well as in others, to the receipt of services that he or she currently needs. Additionally, legal mechanisms frequently enable a competent independent adult to foresee and prepare for the possibility that he or she might become incompetent and dependent, by providing for a substitute decisionmaking process of the individual's own choosing.Keywords
This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:
- Promoting the legal rights of older adults: Role of the primary care physicianJournal of Legal Medicine, 1982
- Legal guardianshipGeriatric Nursing, 1981
- Intervention Through Adult Protective Services ProgramsThe Gerontologist, 1978
- The Penultimate Will. Its Potential as an Instrument to Protect the Mentally Deteriorated ElderlyThe Gerontologist, 1973