Questions of life and death

The continuous evolution of health care technology has brought with it a growing need to evaluate the quality of the lives it saves or prolongs. Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders, euthanasia and living wills all raise the issue of who decides about the quality of a person's life. Although nurses and other health care professionals have developed codes of ethics to deal with these difficult evaluations, ethics are not law. Ethics are derived from culture, religion and societal and individual concepts of morality. Law is the set of rules a society chooses to enact and enforce. Real difficulty arises when health care providers must face a situation where personal and professional codes of ethics clash with the law.