There are continual “crises” in health care systems worldwide as producer and patient groups unify and decry the “underfunding” of health care. Sometimes this cacophony is the self interest of profit seeking producers and often it is advocacy of unproven therapies. Such pressure is to be expected and needs careful management by explicit rationing criteria which determine who gets access to what...

Organ donation offers opportunities for people in critical care units to help save the lives of other patients. It is not always easy, however, to handle the transition from treating a patient to preserving a potential donor, and organ donation consistently provokes ethical questions in critical care units. What do we expect ethics to deliver? In light of a recent ethics conference in Denmark, ...

patient and user choice are at the forefront of the debate on the future direction of health and public services provision in many industrialized countries in europe and elsewhere. it is used both, as a means to achieve desired policy goals in public health care systems such as greater efficiency and improved quality of care, and as a good with its own intrinsic value. however, the evidence sug...

Bioethics, clinical ethics, and professional ethics are mature, welldeveloped fields of applied ethics that focus on medical research, patient autonomy and patient care, patient– healthcare professional relationships, and issues that arise in clinical and other medical settings. However, despite these developments, little attention has been paid to the organizational aspects of healthcare in th...

consistently superb treatment of almost every topic. This is accomplished, in part, by the extraordinary cast of contributors, which is composed of sixty-six world-renowned experts in the field. However, someone wishing to be picayune might question the chapter written on medical and surgical treatment of epilepsy (chapter 50) as lacking substance. Whereas the medical aspects of seizure disorde...

In blunt terms, the thesis I argue for here is that poetry is of no use in health care ethics education, because poetry is of no use. Put more circumspectly, insofar as a poem is given to health care students to read as a poem, it will not help achieve the ends of health care ethics education This is a conceptual point, arising from the idea that any genuine engagement of an individual with a p...

Ethics may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about “strengthening the ministry in turbulent times,” or perhaps even the second or third thing. But it is critical. It is critical because beneath the many factors that make up “turbulent times” are the identity and integrity of Catholic health care. Above all, through turbulent times, Catholic health care must remain true to ...