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Experience with open disclosure and its study are restricted to certain western countries. In addition, there are concerns that open disclosure may be less suitable in non-western countries. The present study ...
The recent Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak, with 28,646 reported cases and 11,323 deaths, was declared a public health emergency of international interest by the World Health Organisation. In Spain, a singl...
Personal health information and biospecimens are valuable research resources essential for the advancement of medicine and protected by national standards and provincial statutes. Research ethics and privacy s...
Few studies have identified the willingness rate of developing countries population to be enrolled in clinical trials.
In most Anglophone nations, policy and law increasingly foster an autonomy-based model, raising issues for large numbers of people who fail to fit the paradigm, and indicating problems in translating practical...
Moral Case Deliberation is a specific form of bioethics education fostering professionals’ moral competence in order to deal with their moral questions. So far, few studies focus in detail on Moral Case Delibe...
Medical professionalism forms a belief system which is used to defend physicians’ ethos against counterforces which might threaten the integrity of medical practice. The current debates on professionalism, how...
The idea of personalised medicine (PM) has gathered momentum recently, attracting funding and generating hopes as well as scepticism. As PM gives rise to differing interpretations, there have been several atte...
Before participation in medical research an informed consent must be obtained. This study investigates whether the readability of patient information and consent documents (PICDs) corresponds to the average ed...
While most studies on HIV/AIDS often identify stigmatization and patients’ unwillingness to access health care as critical problems in the control of the pandemic, very few studies have focused on the possible...
Maximizing comprehension is a major challenge for informed consent processes in low-literacy and resource-limited settings. Application of rapid qualitative assessments to improve the informed consent process ...
Biobanks have been heralded as essential tools for translating biomedical research into practice, driving precision medicine to improve pathways for global healthcare treatment and services. Many nations have ...
In the Netherlands, consent from relatives is obligatory for post mortal donation. This study explored the perspectives of relatives regarding the request for consent for donation in cases without donor regist...
Over the past 25 years, there has been growing recognition of the importance of studying the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) of genetic and genomic research. A large investment into ELSI research...
Continuous deep sedation at the end of life is a practice that has been the topic of considerable ethical debate, for example surrounding its perceived similarity or dissimilarity with physician-assisted dying...
The original article was published in BMC Medical Ethics 2016 17:13
While evaluation of ethical aspects in health technology assessment (HTA) has gained much attention during the past years, the integration of ethics in HTA practice still presents many challenges. In response ...
The language of “participant-driven research,” “crowdsourcing” and “citizen science” is increasingly being used to encourage the public to become involved in research ventures as both subjects and scientists. ...
Systems medicine is the name for an assemblage of scientific strategies and practices that include bioinformatics approaches to human biology (especially systems biology); “big data” s...
Moral case deliberation (MCD) as a form of clinical ethics support is usually implemented in health care institutions and educational programs. While there is no previous research on the use of clinical ethics...
We have examined healthcare staff attitudes of toward a blogging cancer patient who publishes critical posts about her treatment and their possible effect on patient-staff relationships and treatment decisions.
The widespread sharing of biological and biomedical data is recognised as a key element in facilitating translation of scientific discoveries into novel clinical applications and services. At the same time, tw...
Personalized medicine (PM) aims to tailor disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment to individuals on the basis of their genes, lifestyle and environments. Patient and interest organizations (PIOs) may pote...
Research ethics review is a critical aspect of the research governance framework for human subjects research. This usually requires that research protocols be submitted to a research ethics committee (REC) for...
The ethical concerns associated with HIV prevention and treatment research have been widely explored in South Africa over the past 3 decades. However, HIV cure research is relatively new to the region and sign...
Drug user networks and community-based organizations advocate for greater, meaningful involvement of people with lived experience of drug use in research, programs and services, and policy initiatives. Communi...
Surveys on attitudes towards assisted dying play an important role in informing public debate, policy and legislation. Unfortunately, surveys are often designed with insufficient attention to framing effects; ...
In research ethics, the most basic question would always be, “which is an ethical issue, which is not?” Interestingly, depending on which ethics guideline we consult, we may have various answers to this questi...
Recently, significant research effort has focused on using Twitter (and other social media) to investigate mental health at the population-level. While there has been influential work in developing ethical gui...
The state of the world is one with scarce medical resources where longevity is not equally distributed. Given such facts, setting priorities in health entails making difficult yet unavoidable decisions about w...
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations set ethical and editorial standards for article publication in most leading medical journals. Here, I examine the strengths and weakn...
Since 2006, the genetic testing company 23andMe has collected biological samples, self-reported information, and consent documents for biobanking and research from more than 1,000,000 individuals (90 % partici...
Although some of the most radical hypothesis related to the practical implementations of human enhancement have yet to become even close to reality, the use of cognitive enhancers is a very tangible phenomenon...
To determine whether the public and scientists consider common arguments (and counterarguments) in support (or not) of animal research (AR) convincing.
In the field of health technology assessment (HTA), there are several approaches that can be used for ethical analysis. However, there is a scarcity of literature that critically evaluates and compares the str...
Balancing the rights and obligations of custodians and applicants in relation to access to biobanks is of utmost importance to guarantee trust and confidence. This study aimed to reveal which issues divide dif...
In many countries health insurers, employers and especially governments are increasingly using pressure and coercion to enhance healthier lifestyles. For example by ever higher taxes on cigarettes and alcoholi...
Although the “right not to know” is well established in international regulations, it has been heavily debated. Ubiquitous results from extended exome and genome analysis have challenged the right not to know....
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Medical Ethics 2016 17:35
Obstetrics and gynaecology always has reputation for being a highly litigious. The field of obstetrics and gynaecology is surrounded by different circumstances that stimulate the doctors to practice defensive ...
The editors of BMC Medical Ethics would like to thank all our reviewers who have contributed to the journal in Volume 16 (2015).
The global interest in developing therapies for Ebola infection management and its prevention is laudable. However the plan to conduct an emergency immunization program specifically for healthcare workers usin...
In specific situations it may be necessary to make an exception to the general rule of informed consent for scientific research with an intervention. Earlier reviews only described subsets of arguments for exc...
The academic and medical literature highlights the positive effects of empathy for patient care. Yet, very little attention has been given to the impact of the requirement for empathy on the physicians themsel...
Although values have increasingly received attention in psychiatric literature over the last three decades, their role has been only partially acknowledged in psychiatric classification endeavors. The review p...
Access to research volunteers may be hampered by low numbers of cases and few eligible participants for rare diseases in clinical settings.
Ethically challenging critical events and decisions are common in nursing homes. This paper presents nursing home doctors’ descriptions of how they include the patient and next of kin in end-of-life decisions.
Depressive disorders are a common form of psychiatric illness and cause significant disability. Regulation authorities, the medical profession and the public require high safety standards for antidepressants t...
Informed consent is a key element of ethical clinical research. Addicted population may be at risk for impaired consent capacity. However, very little research has focused on their comprehension of consent for...
Current guidelines do not clearly outline when assent should be attained from paediatric research participants, nor do they detail the necessary elements of the assent process. This stems from the fact that th...
Public involvement activities are promoted as measures for ensuring good governance in challenging fields, such as biomedical research and innovation. Proponents of public involvement activities include indivi...
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