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Health care workers (HCWs) are susceptible to moral stress and distress when they are faced with morally challenging situations where it is difficult to act in line with their moral standards. In times of cris...
Doctors are increasingly faced with end-of-life decisions. Little is known about how medical students approach euthanasia. The objective of this study was to evaluate, among medical students and residents, the...
Biobanking and genomic research requires collection and storage of human tissue from study participants. From participants’ perspectives within the African context, this can be associated with fears and misgiv...
Conventional consent practices face ethical challenges in continuously evolving digital health environments due to their static, one-time nature. Dynamic consent offers a promising solution, providing adaptabi...
Socially assistive devices (care robots, companions, smart screen assistants) have been advocated as a promising tool in elderly care in Western healthcare systems. Ethical debates indicate various challenges....
Clinical trials should be as inclusive as possible to facilitate equitable access to research and better reflect the population towards which any intervention is aimed. Informed by the UK’s National Institute ...
Collecting post-mortem brain tissue is essential, especially from healthy “control” individuals, to advance knowledge on increasingly common neurological and mental disorders. Yet, healthy individuals, on whic...
The original article was published in BMC Medical Ethics 2023 24:79
Allocation of scarce organs for transplantation is ethically challenging. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been proposed to assist in liver allocation, however the ethics of this remains unexplored and the vie...
Voluntary post-mortem donation to science (PDS) is the most appropriate source for body dissection in medical education and training, and highly useful for biomedical research. In Mexico, unclaimed bodies are ...
In this Matters Arising article, we outline how the recent article “The impact on patients of objections by institutions to assisted dying: a qualitative study of family caregivers’ perceptions” (White et al.,...
Improving the ways in which routinely-collected mental health data are shared could facilitate substantial advances in research and treatment. However, this process should only be undertaken in partnership wit...
Massively parallel sequencing techniques, such as whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), may reveal unsolicited findings (UFs) unrelated to the diagnostic aim. Such techniques are freq...
Informed consent procedures for large population-based cohort studies should be comprehensive and easy-to-use. This is particularly challenging when participants from different socio-economic groups and multic...
Parental refusal of routine childhood vaccination remains an ethically contested area. This systematic review sought to explore and characterise the normative arguments made about parental refusal of routine v...
Defensive medicine is physicians’ deviation from standard medical care which is primarily intended either to reduce or avoid medico legal litigation. Although the Federal Ethics Committee review in Ethiopia ha...
Researchers must adhere to ethical and scientific standards in their research involving human subjects; therefore, their knowledge of human subjects’ rights is essential. A tool to measure the extent of this k...
The organ donation and transplantation (ODT) system heavily relies on the willingness of individuals to donate their organs. While it is widely believed that public trust plays a crucial role in shaping donati...
Ethical review systems need to build on their experiences of COVID-19 research to enhance their preparedness for future pandemics. Recommendations from representatives from over twenty countries include: impro...
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, different countries sought to manufacture and supply effective vaccines to control the disease and prevent and protect public health in society. The implementation...
The health sector aims to improve health outcomes and access to healthcare. At the same time, the sector relies on unsustainable environmental practices that are increasingly recognised to be catastrophic thre...
Porcine-derived products serve as an effective solution for a wide range of human ailments; however, there may be objections to their use due to Islamic religious prohibitions on consuming products derived fro...
We discuss the concept of women’s empowerment in FemTech, considering cultural and legal differences, ethical concerns, and legal consequences. We claim that it is crucial to prioritize privacy, a fundamental ...
The introduction and wide application of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) has triggered further evolution of routines in the practice of prenatal diagnosis. ‘Routinization’ of prenatal diagnosis however ha...
Medical assistance in dying (MAiD) sparks debate in several countries, some of which allow or plan to allow MAiD where a mental disorder is the sole underlying medical condition (MAiD-MD). Since MAiD-MD is bec...
Prenatal genetic testing, in particular non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), as well as screening for risks associated with pregnancy, and counseling, play pivotal roles in reproductive healthcare, offering v...
With the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), global researchers were confronted with major challenges. The German National Pandemic Cohort Network (NAPKON) was launched in...
New disease-modifying ways to treat Parkinson’s disease (PD) may soon become a reality with intracerebral transplantation of cell products produced from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). The aim of this stud...
Medical errors, unsatisfactory outcomes, or treatment complications often prompt patient complaints about healthcare providers. In response, physicians may adopt defensive practices to mitigate objections, avo...
While genomic data sharing can facilitate important health research and discovery benefits, these must be balanced against potential privacy risks and harms to individuals. Understanding public attitudes and p...
Each individual’s unique health-related beliefs can greatly impact the patient-clinician relationship. When there is a conflict between the patient’s preferences and recommended medical care, it can create a s...
Healthcare professionals use the ethics of justice and care to construct moral reasoning. These ethics are conflicting in nature; different value systems and orders of justice and care are applied to the cause...
The Correction to this article has been published in BMC Medical Ethics 2023 24:103
One of the core goals of Digital Health Technologies (DHT) is to transform healthcare services and delivery by shifting primary care from hospitals into the community. However, achieving this goal will rely on...
The original article was published in BMC Medical Ethics 2023 24:51
Considering ethical issues in midwifery care is essential for improving the quality of health services and the client's satisfaction. This study aimed to develop and validate the code of ethics for Midwives in...
Among the myriad voices advocating diverging ideas of what general practice ought to be, none seem to adequately capture its ethical core. There is a paucity of attempts to integrate moral theory with empirica...
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) play a vital role in safeguarding the rights and interests of both research participants and researchers. However, China initiated the establishment of its own IRB system rel...
Standard interpretations of the ethical principle of respect for persons have not incorporated the views and values of patients, especially patients from groups underrepresented in research. This limits the ab...
Forward-looking, democratically oriented governance is needed to ensure that human genome editing serves rather than undercuts public values. Scientific, policy, and ethics communities have recognized this nec...
In June 2016, Canada legalized medical assistance in dying (MAiD). From the outset, some healthcare institutions (including faith-based and non-faith-based hospitals, hospices, and residential aged care facili...
Anticipatory planning in the UK focuses on supporting people who anticipate periods of impaired capacity to express their wishes about future care through processes such as advance care planning. Other countri...
Infertility is an increasingly prevalent disease in society and is considered by the World Health Organization to be a public health problem. An important ethical issue arises from the clarification of reprodu...
The significance of medical implants goes beyond technical functioning and reaches into everyday life, with consequences for individuals as well as society. Ethical aspects associated with the everyday use of ...
The original article was published in BMC Medical Ethics 2023 24:55
Research ethics is intertwined with and depends on building robust and responsive research governance systems alongside researchers. Globally there has been substantial investment in agriculture, nutrition, an...
The fourth section of the 1967 Abortion Act states that individuals (including health care practitioners) do not have to participate in an abortion if they have a conscientious objection. A conscientious objec...
Shared decision making (SDM) and advance care planning (ACP) are important evidence and ethics based concepts that can be translated in communication tools to aid the treatment decision-making process. Althoug...
In this qualitative analysis we aimed to explore addiction physicians’ perspectives on safer injection education for people who inject drugs, especially: (1) on possible means of introducing safer injection ed...
Although the importance of clinical ethics in contemporary clinical environments is established, development of formal clinical ethics services in the Australia health system has, to date, been ad hoc. This st...
Thirst and dry mouth are common symptoms in terminally ill patients. In their day-to-day practice, palliative care physicians regularly encounter ethical dilemmas, especially regarding artificial hydration. Fe...
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