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Because of their responsibilities for providing high-quality care, at times when they are continuously confronted with inherent professional and ethical challenges, nurses should meet high ethical standards of practice and conduct. Contrary to other countries, where codes of ethics for nurses are formulated to support those standards and to guide nurses' professional practice, Belgian nurses do not have a formal code of ethics. Nevertheless, professional ethics is recognized as an important aspect in legal and other professional documents. The aim of this article is to illustrate that codes of ethics are not the only professional documents reflecting nurses' values, norms and responsibilities. Other documents can also set out professional nursing ethics, and as such replace codes of ethics.

The subject of speech-language pathologists providing services over a distance via telepractice is attracting the attention of the profession. The new service delivery model will challenge us to exploit its potential without violating legal constraints or compromising our affirmative ethical responsibilities. This article provides an overview of the implications of current state licensure laws on telepractice and a look at the issues of competence, standard of care, privacy, informed consent, and the use of support personnel. Several principles are offered to guide the practitioner and additional resources are suggested.

Health professionals must be familiar with regulations and statutes addressing privacy and confidentiality issues. The occupational health nurse must also be aware of specific limitations and exceptions to confidentiality. Occupational health nurses must become proactive in governmental affairs to lobby for changes to include workplace health records in future legislation. To ensure employee trust, occupational health nurses must maintain their ethical and legal responsibility to act morally when making decisions related to confidentiality. The AAOHN Code of Ethics and Interpretive Statements and the AAOHN Position Statement on Confidentiality of Health Information can be used as frameworks to guide occupational health nursing practice.

The ethical chapter of the Israel Medical Association has recently issued guidelines with regard to sexual relationships between doctors and patients or past patients. This paper juxtaposes the paternalistic and severe attitude to doctor-patient sex with the relaxation and individualization of decisions regarding doctors' involvement in assisted suicide, passive and active euthanasia. The discussion bears on our concepts of palliative care and our expectations from it.

In this article we consider some of the implications of the UK Human Rights Act 1998 for nurses in practice. The Act has implications for all aspects of social life in Britain, particularly for health care. We provide an introduction to the discourse of rights in health care and discuss some aspects of four articles from the Act. The reciprocal relationship between rights and obligations prompted us to consider also the relationship between guidelines in the United Kingdom Central Council's Code of professional conduct and the requirements of the Human Rights Act 1998. We conclude with the recommendation that the new legislation should be welcomed for its potential to support good practice and to urge critical and reflective practice rather than as yet another burdensome bureaucratic imposition.

This article examines the legal status of "soft law" in the fields of medicine and medical research. Many areas of clinical practice and research involve complex and rapidly changing issues for which the law provides no guidance. Instead, guidance for physicians and researchers comes from what has often been called "soft law"--non-legislative, non-regulatory sources, such as ethics policy statements, codes, and guidelines from professional or quasi-governmental bodies. This article traces the evolution of these "soft law" instruments: how they are created, how they are adopted within the professional community, and how they become accepted by the courts. It studies the relationship between soft law instruments and the courts. It includes an examination of the approaches to judicial analysis used by the courts in theory and in practice. The authors then examine the jurisprudence to see how courts will adopt professional norms as the legal standard of care in some circumstances and not others. They consider the legal concerns and ethical issues surrounding the weight attached to professional practices and norms in law. The authors demonstrate how practices and policies that guide professional conduct may ultimately bear weight as norms recognizable and enforceable within the legal sphere.