title: How Should Colleagues Respond to Diminishing Capacities of an Aging Surgeon?
abstract: When an esteemed elderly colleague needs assistance completing procedures safely, fellow health professionals have the responsibility to respond in order to mitigate risk to patients. There is a strong ethical basis for bringing the surgeon's declining capacity to his or her attention as well as to the attention of others. Ongoing capacity assessments could be one method for tracking diminished capacities among surgeons so that they can stop practicing surgery before putting patients at risk.
authors: Linda Kohler Anderson Professor of Surgery and Surgical Ethics, chief of endocrine surgery, and the associate director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, and president of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons, and contributes regularly to the literature on surgical ethics and endocrine surgery.
authors: Peter
authors: P
authors: Angelos
mesh_terms: D000375:Aging; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D002983:Clinical Competence; D003071:Cognition; D003072:Cognition Disorders; D003142:Communication; D004185:Disability Evaluation; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D006801:Humans; D007400:Interprofessional Relations / Q000941:ethics*; D061214:Patient Safety; D012941:Social Responsibility; D066231:Surgeons / Q000941:ethics / Q000523:psychology