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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...
As more people are living longer, they become frail and are affected by multi-morbidity, resulting in increased demands from the ambulance service. Being vulnerable, older patients may have reduced decision-ma...
Adherence to ethical guidelines and regulations and protecting and respecting the dignity and autonomy of participants by obtaining a valid informed consent form (ICF) prior to participation in research are cr...
Ethical decision‑making and behavior of nurses are major factors that can affect the quality of nursing care. Moral development of nurses to making better ethical decision-making is an essential element for ma...
An increasing number of studies on physicians’ professionalism have been done since the 2002 publication of Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium: A Physician Charter. The Charter proposed three fundament...
Little is known about communication between patients, families, and healthcare providers regarding ethical concerns that patients and families experience in the course of illness and medical care. To address t...
The use of long-term life-sustaining technology for children improves survival rates in paediatric intensive care units (PICUs), but it may also increase long-term morbidity. One example of this is children wh...
The Correction to this article has been published in BMC Medical Ethics 2023 24:67
Although the Covid-19 epidemic challenged existing medical care norms and practices, it was no excuse for unlawful conduct. On the contrary, legal compliance proved essential in fighting the pandemic. Within t...
Over the last few decades biobanks have been recognised as institutions that may revolutionise biomedical research and the development of personalised medicine. Poland, however, still lacks clear regulations r...
Although the Life-Sustaining Treatment (LST) Decision Act was enforced in 2018 in Korea, data on whether it is well established in actual clinical settings are limited. Hospital-acquired pneumonia (HAP) is a c...
It is widely acknowledged that trust plays an important role for the acceptability of data sharing practices in research and healthcare, and for the adoption of new health technologies such as AI. Yet there is...
Institutional review boards (IRBs) are formally designated to review, approve, and monitor biomedical research. They are responsible for ensuring that researchers comply with the ethical guidelines concerning ...
It has been argued that ethics review committees—e.g., Research Ethics Committees, Institutional Review Boards, etc.— have weaknesses in reviewing big data and artificial intelligence research. For instance, t...
Healthcare providers have to make ethically complex clinical decisions which may be a source of stress. Researchers have recently introduced Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based applications to assist in clinica...
Biobanking biospecimens and consent are common practice in paediatric research. We need to explore children and young people’s (CYP) knowledge and perspectives around the use of and consent to biobanking. This...
Similar to many other countries, in Germany patients with alcohol-related liver disease are obliged to prove their abstinence before being accepted on a waitlist for liver transplantation. Health care professi...
Dementia care is essential to promote the well-being of patients but remains a difficult task prone to ethical issues. These issues include questions like whether manipulating a person with dementia is ethical...
Pregnant people have been overlooked or excluded from clinical research, resulting in a lack of scientific knowledge on medication safety and efficacy during pregnancy. Thus far, both the opportunities to gene...
Literature on issues relating to comprehension during the process of obtaining informed consent (IC) has largely focused on the challenges potential participants can face in understanding the IC documents, and...
Despite the recognition that developing artificial intelligence (AI) that is trustworthy is necessary for public acceptability and the successful implementation of AI in healthcare contexts, perspectives from ...
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates goods accounting for 20% of US consumers’ total expenditure. The agency’s potential susceptibility to corporate lobbying and political influence may adversel...
The COVID-19 pandemic causes moral challenges and moral distress for healthcare professionals and, due to an increased work load, reduces time and opportunities for clinical ethics support services. Neverthele...
Professionalism is a crucial component of medical practice. It is a culturally sensitive notion that generally consists of behaviors, values, communication, and relationships. This study is a qualitative study...
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...
We explored the views of Botswana stakeholders involved in developing, implementing and applying ethical standards for return of individual study results from genomic research. This allowed for mapping opportu...
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),...
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