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The world literature shows that empirical research regarding the process of decision-making when cancer in adolescents is no longer curable has been conducted in High-income, English speaking countries. The ob...
As the practice of medicine inevitably raises both ethical and legal issues, it had been recommended since 1999 that medical ethics and human rights be taught at every medical school. Most Nigerian medical sch...
The scarcity of human organs requires the transplant community to make difficult allocation decisions. This process begins at individual medical centers, where transplant teams decide which patients to place o...
Care-dependency constitutes an important issue with regard to the approval of end-of-life decisions, yet attitudes towards assisted suicide and euthanasia are understudied among care-dependent older adults. We...
Social media and Internet technologies present several emerging and ill-explored issues for a modern healthcare workforce. One issue is patient-targeted Googling (PTG), which involves a healthcare professional...
Treatment informed consent aims to preserve the autonomy of patients in the clinician – patient relationship so as to ensure valid consent. An acceptable method of evaluating understanding of consent informati...
Fair prioritization of healthcare resources has been on the agenda for decades, but resource allocation dilemmas in clinical practice remain challenging. Can clinical ethics committees (CECs) be of help? The a...
Ensuring adequate informed consent for surgery in a trauma setting is challenging. We developed and pilot tested an educational video containing information regarding the informed consent process for surgery i...
The use of tissue collected at a forensic post-mortem for forensic genetics research purposes remains of ethical concern as the process involves obtaining informed consent from grieving family members. Two for...
The review of human participant research by Research Ethics Committees (RECs) or Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) is a complex multi-faceted process that cannot be reduced to an algorithm. However, this does...
The legitimacy of conscientious objection to abortion continues to fuel heated debate in Italy. In two recent decisions, the European Committee for Social Rights underlined that conscientious objection places ...
As part of the preparations to establish a population-based biobank in a large Israeli health organization, we aimed to investigate through focus groups the knowledge, perceptions and attitudes of insured Isra...
The relationships between age and the life-supporting treatments use, and between gender and the life-supporting treatments use are still controversial. Using extracorporeal membrane oxygenation as an example ...
Starting dialysis at an advanced age is a clinical challenge and an ethical dilemma. The advantages of starting dialysis at “extreme” ages are questionable as high dialysis-related morbidity induces a reflecti...
Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a set of technologies that are of increasing interest to researchers. BCI has been proposed as assistive technology for individuals who are non-communicative or paralyzed, suc...
Mobile applications and socio-sexual networking websites are used by outreach workers to respond synchronously to questions and provide information, resources, and referrals on sexual health and STI/HIV preven...
In February, 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the ban on medical assistance in dying (MAiD). In June, 2016, the federal government passed Bill C-14, permitting MAiD. Current medical students will ...
Protecting human subjects from being exploited is one of the main ethical challenges for clinical research. However, there is also a responsibility to protect and respect the communities who are hosting the re...
New technologies facilitate the enhancement of a wide range of human dispositions, capacities, or abilities. While it is argued that we need to set limits to human enhancement, it is unclear where we should fi...
Health checks identify (risk factors for) disease in people without symptoms. They may be offered by the government through population screenings and by other providers to individual users as ‘personal health ...
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...
2022 Citation Impact
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3.5 - 5-year Impact Factor
1.410 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
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