Speaking from the perspective of a clinician and teacher, good medical ethics needs to make medicine better. Over the past 50 years medical ethics has helped shape the culture in medicine and medical practice for the better. However, recent healthcare scandals in the UK suggest more needs to be done to translate ethical reasoning into ethical practice. Focusing on clinical practice and individu...

Case studies used in psychiatry for teaching and learning can include large amounts of personal information, and most medical journals refuse to publish case material without patient consent. However, not all patients are capable of consenting and maintaining anonymity is not always successful. Disclosure of personal information without consent can cause a sense of violation, but a principle of...

This article reviews the landscape of ethical challenges integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into smart healthcare products, including medical electronic devices. Differences between traditional ethics in domain and emerging with AI-driven are presented, particularly as they relate to transparency, bias, privacy, safety, responsibility, justice, autonomy. Open recommendations outlined enab...

The ethics of hope has often been understood as a conflict between duties: do not lie versus do not destroy hope. However, such a way of framing the ethics of hope may easily place healthcare professionals at the side of realism and patients at the side of (false) hope. That leaves unexamined relational dimensions of hope. The objective of this study was to describe a relational ethics of hope ...

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving institutional healthcare ethics committees. This topic has been the subject of recent articles in JCE. Healthcare ethics committees have also recently been the subject of significant public policy attention. Disturbingly, Bobby Schindler and others have described ethics committees as "death panels." But most of the ...

Traditional approaches to bioethics, that privilege impartiality and objectivity and that focus primarily on moral reasoning, are relatively silent on the moral habitability of healthcare environments. Nurses and others in "the trenches" of healthcare are increasingly voicing the need to address everyday ethical issues, interdisciplinary tensions, and systemic concerns, in addition to the ethic...

Jacinta O.A. Tan*, Tony Hope, Anne Stewart Research Fellow, Oxford Centre for Ethics and Communication in Health Care Practice (Ethox Centre), Department of Public Health, University of Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK Professor of Medical Ethics, Oxford Centre for Ethics and Communication in Health Care Practice, University of Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK Consultant Adolescent Psychiatrist, Oxfordshire Ment...