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The doctor-patient relationship is a crucial aspect of primary-care practice Research on associations between quality of care provision and burnout and empathy in a primary care setting could improve this rela...
Research into personal health data holds great potential not only for improved treatment but also for economic growth. In these years many countries are developing policies aimed at facilitating such research ...
The Correspondence to this article has been published in BMC Medical Ethics 2019 20:6
The original article was published in BMC Medical Ethics 2017 18:48
The increased use of information technology in every day health care creates vast amounts of stored health data that can be used for research. The secondary research use of routinely collected data raises ques...
The informed-consent process should be one of meaningful information exchange between researchers and study participants. One of the responsibilities of research ethics committees is to oversee appropriate inf...
Medical schools have a major impact on future doctors’ ethics and their attitudes towards cooperation with the pharmaceutical industry. From childhood, medical students who are related to a physician are expos...
The Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) is an interdisciplinary protocol, aiming to ensure that dying patients receive dignified and individualized treatment and care at the end-of-life. LCP was originally developed ...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Medical Ethics 2017 18:52
This paper proposes a refocusing of consent for clinical genetic testing, moving away from an emphasis on autonomy and information provision, towards an emphasis on the virtues of healthcare professionals seek...
Carrier screening is generally performed with the aim of identifying healthy couples at risk of having a child affected with a monogenic disorder to provide them with reproductive options. Expanded carrier scr...
The original article was published in BMC Medical Ethics 2017 18:43
The conduct of research in settings affected by disasters such as hurricanes, floods and earthquakes is challenging, particularly when infrastructures and resources were already limited pre-disaster. However, ...
Between 2013 and 2016, West Africa experienced the largest ever outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease. In the absence of registered treatments or vaccines to control this lethal disease, the World Health Organizatio...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Medical Ethics 2017 18:45
Ethical issues related to comparative effectiveness research, or research that compares existing standards of care, have recently received considerable attention. In this paper we focus on how Ethics Review Commi...
There is currently no consensus from the relevant stakeholders regarding the operational and construct definitions of child assent for research. As such, the requirements for assent are often construed in diff...
This paper joins the debate over changes in the role of health professionals when applying advance directives to manage the decision-making process at the end of life care. Issues in relation to advance direct...
Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) is reportedly the most effective therapy for relapsing Clostridium Difficile infection (CDI) and a potential therapeutic option for many diseases. It also poses important et...
This article explores the reasons in favour of revising and extending the current 14-day statutory limit to maintaining human embryos in culture. This limit is enshrined in law in over a dozen countries, inclu...
The use of coercion is morally problematic and requires an ongoing critical reflection. We wondered if not knowing or being uncertain whether coercion is morally right or justified (i.e. experiencing moral dou...
Obtaining prospective written consent from women to participate in trials when they are experiencing an obstetric emergency is challenging. Alternative consent pathways, such as gaining verbal consent at enrol...
There is ambiguity with regard to what counts as an acceptable level of risk in clinical research in pregnant women and there is no input from stakeholders relative to such research risks. The aim of our paper...
Researchers are required to seek consent from Indigenous communities prior to conducting research but there is inadequate information about how Indigenous people understand and become fully engaged with this c...
In this article we aim to assess the ethical desirability of self-test diagnostic kits for influenza, focusing in particular on the potential benefits and challenges posed by a new, mobile phone-based tool cur...
Biobanks and biospecimen collections are becoming a primary means of delivering personalized diagnostics and tailoring individualized therapeutics. This shift towards precision medicine (PM) requires interacti...
Despite the growing recognition for the need to improve the health of prisoners in Canada and the need for health research, there has been little discussion of the ethical issues with regards to health researc...
In 2014, the editorial board of BMC Medical Ethics came together to devise sections for the journal that would (a) give structure to the journal (b) help ensure that authors’ research is matched to the most appro...
Consent remains a crucial, yet challenging, cornerstone of clinical practice. The ethical, legal and professional understandings of this construct have evolved away from a doctor-centred act to a patient-centr...
The anticipation of ethical issues that may arise with the clinical use of genomic technologies is crucial to envision their future implementation in a manner sensitive to local contexts. Yet, populations in l...
The EU offers a suitable milieu for the comparison and harmonisation of healthcare across different languages, cultures, and jurisdictions (albeit with a supranational legal framework), which could provide imp...
The 11 original regions for organ allocation in the United States were determined by proximity between hospitals that provided deceased donors and transplant programs. As liver transplants became more successf...
Robust technology infrastructure is needed to enable learning health care systems to improve quality, access, and cost. Such infrastructure relies on the trust and confidence of individuals to share their heal...
Because no single person or group holds knowledge about all aspects of research, mechanisms are needed to support knowledge exchange and engagement. Expertise in the research setting necessarily includes scien...
Smart-home technologies, comprising environmental sensors, wearables and video are attracting interest in home healthcare delivery. Development of such technology is usually justified on the basis of the techn...
Biomedical research increasingly relies on long-term studies involving use and re-use of biological samples and data stored in large repositories or “biobanks” over lengthy periods, often raising questions abo...
Recent findings suggest that medical students’ moral competence decreases throughout medical school. This pilot study gives preliminary insights into the effects of two educational interventions in ethics clas...
Today, nurses are required to have knowledge and awareness concerning professional values as standards to provide safe and high-quality ethical care. Nurses’ perspective on professional values affects decision...
Implicit biases involve associations outside conscious awareness that lead to a negative evaluation of a person on the basis of irrelevant characteristics such as race or gender. This review examines the evide...
Professional guidelines have addressed ethical dilemmas posed by a few types of nontraditional procreative arrangements (e.g., gamete donations between family members), but many questions arise regarding how p...
Hip fractures are common and serious injuries in the geriatric population. Obtaining informed consent for surgery in geriatric patients can be difficult due to the high prevalence of comorbid cognitive impairm...
As the implementation of new approaches and procedures of medical ethics is as complex and resource-consuming as in other fields, strategies and activities must be carefully planned to use the available means ...
The fundamental determinant of death in donation after circulatory determination of death is the cessation of brain circulation and function. We therefore propose the term donation after brain circulation determi...
Paediatric cancer care poses ethically difficult situations that can lead to value conflicts about what is best for the child, possibly resulting in moral distress. Research on moral distress is lacking in pae...
End-of-life decision making constitutes a major challenge for bioethical deliberation and political governance in modern democracies: On the one hand, it touches upon fundamental convictions about life, death,...
Advances in genetic and genomic research have introduced challenges in obtaining informed consent for research in low and middle-income settings. However, there are only few studies that have explored challeng...
Over 90% of the organs transplanted in China before 2010 were procured from prisoners. Although Chinese officials announced in December 2014 that the country would completely cease using organs harvested from ...
As thousands of healthy research participants are being included in small and large imaging studies, it is essential that dilemmas raised by the detection of incidental findings are adequately handled. Current...
This is a study involving three HIV clinics in the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Manitoba. We sought to identify ethical issues involving health care providers and clinic clients in thes...
The introduction of genomics and biobanking methodologies to the African research context has also introduced novel ways of doing science, based on values of sharing and reuse of data and samples. This shift r...
Advance directives (AD) imply the promise of determining future medical treatment in case of decisional incapacity. However, clinical practice increasingly indicates that standardized ADs often fail to support...
A cross-sectional study to ascertain what the Singapore population would regard as material risk in the anaesthesia consent-taking process and identify demographic factors that predict patient preferences in m...
Value sensitivity – the ability to recognize value-related issues when they arise in practice – is an indispensable competence for medical practitioners to enter decision-making processes related to ethical qu...
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