Scientific progress is a significant basis for change in public-health policy and practice, but the field also invests in value-laden concepts and responds daily to sociopolitical, cultural and evaluative concerns. The concepts that drive much of public-health practice are shaped by the collective and individual mores that define social systems. This paper seeks to describe the ethics processes...

National literature on ethics provides an insight into the nature and development of a dialogue on health issues within a population. This study investigated the health ethics discourse in Pakistan. The purpose was to critically reflect on the nature and level of such discussions with the aim of stimulating an interest in the ethical implications of health and medicine in developing countries. ...

Over the past three decades, a literature has emerged identifying, defining, and addressing the phenomenon of moral distress in health care professionals. Since the concept was originated in 1984, many writers have discussed moral distress as a nursing ethics issue, or more broadly as a clinical ethics issue, but there has not been literature addressing moral distress in health care professiona...

1. Palmer SK: Preserving patients’ health curing WWII: Commentary. ANESTHESIOLOGY 2010; 113:685– 6 2. Beecher HK: Ethics and clinical research. N Eng J Med 1966; 274:1354 – 60 3. Vollmann J, Winau R: Informed consent in human experimentation before the Nuremberg code. BMJ 1996; 313:1445–9 4. Harkness J, Lederer S, Wikler D: Laying ethical foundations for clinical research. Bull World Health Org...

The issue of ethics and economic efficiency in the provisioning and delivery of services becomes complex in the Indian context where health indicators are poor. In an attempt to explore this issue, this round table article first provides an overview of the field of ethics in health care, the health care sector in India and its facilities, the key institutional actors and finally, the key ethica...

The field of bioethics has been split into subspecialties over the past few decades. In some cases, it was divided in terms of social domains, such as clinical ethics, research ethics and public-health ethics. In other cases, it was separated in terms of methodological approaches, including principle-based bioethics, virtue ethics and narrative ethics. Yet more divisions were made in terms of m...

Abstract Background and Objectives: Study of clinical competence in nursing helps determine the quality of health care delivered to patients. Given the priority of observance of principles over caretaking and necessity of spirituality existence at the core of health care provision, this study was conducted to investigate clinical competence and its relationship with professional ethics and s...

Knowledge of the heterosexual spread of HIV is needed to plan future health-care needs. In December 1989 we gained approval and finance for unlinked anonymous testing of neonatal Guthrie card samples in Scotland. Local ethics committee approval was required before testing could start. Twenty ethics committees were approached in the 15 Scottish health board areas. Nineteen of the committees have...

This paper responds to Dr Cassell's requestfor a fuller explanation ofmy argument in the paper, Against medical ethics: a philosopher's view. A distinction is made between two accounts of ethics in general, and the philosophical basis of health work ethics is briefly stated. The implications of applying this understanding of ethics to medical education are