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Self-binding directives (SBDs) are psychiatric advance directives that include the possibility for service users to consent in advance to compulsory care in future mental health crises. Legal provisions for SB...
Biobanks are a key aspect of healthcare research; they enable access to a wide range of heterogenous samples and data, as well as saving individual researchers time and funds on the collection, storage and/or ...
Moral distress has been described as moral constraints and uncertainty connected with guilty feelings of being unable to give care in accordance with one’s values for good care. Various instruments to measure ...
We would like to respond to the article “Organ donation after euthanasia starting at home in a patient with multiple system atrophy Tajaâte et al., [2021] 22:120” on organ donation after euthanasia from home [...
The original article was published in BMC Medical Ethics 2021 22:120
The Matters Arising to this article has been published in BMC Medical Ethics 2023 24:33
We would like to respond to the comment we received from our colleagues on our case report about organ donation after euthanasia starting at home. We reply to their statements on medical and legal aspects, and...
The original article was published in BMC Medical Ethics 2023 24:34
While reporting of individual conflicts of interest is formalised, it is unclear to what extent the funding of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) is formally reported. The aim of this study is to explore the ...
Mental healthcare users and patients were described as a particularly vulnerable group in the debate on the burdens of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just what this means and what normative conclusions can be derived ...
Moral distress appears when a healthcare professional is not able to carry out actions in accordance with their professional ethical standards. The Moral Distress Scale-Revised is the most widely used to asses...
Research on the impact of ethics reflection groups (ERG) (also called moral case deliberations (MCD)) is complex and scarce. Within a larger study, two years of ERG sessions have been used as an intervention t...
It has not been established how to assess children’s and adolescents’ decision-making capacity (DMC) and there has been little discussion on the way their decision-making (DM). The purpose of this study was to...
In 2021, federal rules from the 21st Century Cures Act mandated most clinical notes be made available in real-time, online, and free of charge to patients, a practice often referred to as “open notes.” This le...
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the reformed guardianship law in Germany, require that persons with a disability, including people with dementia in Alzheimer’s disease (PwAD),...
The overarching aim of this article is to scrutinize how severity can work as a qualifier for the moral impetus of malady. While there is agreement that malady is of negative value, there is disagreement about pr...
The worldwide increase in older persons demands technological solutions to combat the shortage of caregiving and to enable aging in place. Smart home health technologies (SHHTs) are promoted and implemented as...
Research is crucial to improve treatment, survival and quality of life for children with cancer. However, recruitment of children for research raises ethical challenges. The aim of this study was to explore an...
Voluntary assisted dying became lawful in Victoria, the first Australian state to permit this practice, in 2019 via the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 (Vic). While conscientious objection by individual health ...
The field of personal health monitoring (PHM) develops rapidly in different contexts, including the armed forces. Understanding the ethical dimension of this type of monitoring is key to a morally responsible ...
Decisions about appropriate treatment at the end of life are common in modern healthcare. Non-treatment decisions (NTDs), comprising both withdrawal and withholding of (potentially) life-prolonging treatment are ...
Despite consensus about the importance of implementing shared decision-making (SDM) in clinical practice, this ideal is inconsistently enacted today. Evidence shows that SDM practices differ in the degree of i...
This study aimed to identify the healthcare providers’ experience and perspectives toward end-of-life care decisions focusing on end-of-life discussion and physician’s order of life-sustaining treatment docume...
Given that biases can distort bioethics work, it has received surprisingly little and fragmented attention compared to in other fields of research. This article provides an overview of potentially relevant bia...
Emergency separation of conjoined twins is performed when one twin is already dead or dying and threatens the survival of the other. The particular decision to perform an emergency separation of conjoined twin...
In its 2015 decision in Montgomery v. Lanarkshire Health Board, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom overruled the long-standing, paternalistic prudent doctor standard of care in favour of a new reasonable pat...
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) research is challenging as it requires enrollment of acutely ill patients. Patients are generally in a suboptimal state for providing informed consent. Patients’ understanding...
We present the reflections of three clinical practitioners on ethical considerations when caring for individuals experiencing incarceration needing in-patient hospital services. We examine the challenges and c...
Although patient advocates have developed templates for standard consent forms, evaluating patient preferences for first in human (FIH) and window of opportunity (Window) trial consent forms is critical due to...
The COVID-19 pandemic presents significant challenges to research ethics committees (RECs) in balancing urgency of review of COVID-19 research with careful consideration of risks and benefits. In the African c...
We assessed potential consent bias in a cohort of > 40,000 adult patients asked by mail after hospitalization to consent to the use of past, present and future clinical and biological data in an ongoing ‘gener...
Moral values in healthcare range widely between interest groups and are principally subjective. Disagreements diminish dialogue and marginalize alternative viewpoints. Extremely premature births exemplify how ...
Medical researchers in resource-constrained settings must make difficult moral decisions about the provision of ancillary care to participants where additional healthcare needs fall outside the scope of the re...
Use of modified texture diets—thickening of liquids and modifying the texture of foods—in the hope of preventing aspiration, pneumonia and choking, has become central to the current management of dysphagia. Th...
There is now rising consensus that community engagement is ethically and scientifically essential for all types of health research. Yet debate continues about the moral aims, methods and appropriate timing in ...
No laws or official guidelines govern voluntary assisted dying (VAD) in Japan. A legislative bill on the termination of life-sustaining measures has yet to be sent to deliberations for legislation, due to stro...
Current advances in biomedical research have introduced new ethical challenges in obtaining informed consent in low and middle-income settings. For example, there are controversies about the use of broad conse...
The informed consent process in clinical trials has been extensively studied to inform the development processes which protect research participants and encourage their autonomy. However, ensuring a meaningful...
Empirical research can become relevant for bioethics in at least two ways. First, by informing the development or refinement of ethical recommendations. Second, by evaluating how ethical recommendations are tr...
Vascular surgery offers a range of treatments to relieve pain and ulcerations, and to prevent sudden death by rupture of blood vessels. The surgical procedures involve risk of injury and harm, which increases ...
This is the first qualitative study to investigate how researchers, who do empirical work in bioethics, relate to objectives of empirical research in bioethics (ERiB). We explore reasons that make some objecti...
In gender-affirming medical care (GAMC), ethical challenges in decision-making are ubiquitous. These challenges are becoming more pressing due to exponentially increasing referrals, politico-legal contestation...
The use of human embryonic stem cells (ES cells) for the development of medical therapies is surrounded with moral concerns. The aim of this study was to assess the public’s attitudes toward the use of ES cell...
In recent years, some researchers have engaged in scientific misconduct such as fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism to achieve higher research performance. Considering their detrimental effects on indiv...
The aim of UK-REACH (“The United Kingdom Research study into Ethnicity And COVID-19 outcomes in Healthcare workers”) is to understand if, how, and why healthcare workers (HCWs) in the United Kingdom (UK) from ...
For over 35 years, Africa has continued to host HIV vaccine trials geared towards overturning the HIV/AIDs pandemic in the continent. However, the methods of sharing the vaccines, when available remain less ce...
Medical artificial intelligence (AI) is considered to be one of the most important assets for the future of innovative individual and public health care. To develop innovative medical AI, it is necessary to re...
This study aims to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the activities of a Bioethics Unit (BU) 5 years since its implementation (2016–2020). The BU is a research unit providing empirical research on ethi...
Everybody has the right to decide whether to receive specific medical treatment or not and to provide their free, prior and informed consent to do so. As dementia progresses, people with Alzheimer’s dementia (...
Healthcare cybersecurity is increasingly targeted by malicious hackers. This sector has many vulnerabilities and health data is very sensitive and valuable. Consequently, any damage caused by malicious intrusi...
The enrolment of children and adolescents in health research requires that attention to be paid to specific assent and consent requirements such as the age range for seeking assent; conditions for parental con...
Social networking sites (SNSs) have penetrated all aspects of health care professionals’ (HCPs’) professional and private lives. A new term, e-professionalism, has emerged, which describes the linking of tradi...
Geographical variations are documented for a wide range of health care services. As many such variations cannot be explained by demographical or epidemiological differences, they are problematic with respect t...
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