Dr. Slosar is director, ethics, Ascension Health, St. Louis. I t is sometimes said that health care ethics as a profession is in an early stage of its maturation process. If this is true, it can also be said that organizational ethics in health care is just now beginning to emerge from its earliest stage of development. In its infancy, organizational ethics was generally viewed as synonymous wi...

Ethics is an ever relevant aspect in every field of human activity in general and health care in particular. From the classical times, professional ethical codes and prayers directed the practice and distribution of the medical care. As the society and its institutions have changed since Hippocrates, so did the practice and delivery of health care changed as the current health care concerns inc...

BACKGROUND Preventive ethics (PE) is a key component of IntegratedEthics (IE), an innovative model developed by the Veterans Health Administration (VA)'s National Center for Ethics in Health Care which establishes a comprehensive, systematic, integrated approach to ethics in health care organizations. Since early 2008, IE has been implemented throughout all 153 medical centers and 21 regional n...

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 spir...

INTRODUCTION The need for fundamental changes within the healthcare arena has long been recognized and accepted. However, the debate as to the role that managed care should play in determining patient treatment and the interplay between ethics, law and the managed care of patients, remains the subject of persistent and intense debate. Corporate business practices, including cost-containment, ar...

Although Marianna Fotaki’s Editorial is helpful and challenging by looking at both the professional and institutional requirements for reinstalling compassion in order to aim for good quality healthcare, the causes that hinder this development remain unexamined. In this commentary, 3 causes are discussed; the boundary between the moral and the political; Neoliberalism; and the underdevelopment ...

The proliferation of clinical ethics in health care institutions around the world has raised the question about the qualifications of those who serve on ethics committees and ethics consultation services. This paper discusses some of weaknesses associated with the most common educational responses to this concern and proposes a complementary approach. Since the majority of those involved in cli...