Evaluating the practice of ethical review by Research Ethics Committees (REC) could help protect the interests of human participants and promote scientific progress. To facilitate such evaluations, we conducted an ethnographic study of how an REC reviews research proposals during its meetings. We observed 13 meetings of a Dutch REC and studied REC documents. We coded this material inductively a...

Ethics committees are the most important practical instrument of clinical ethics in Belgium and fulfil three tasks: the ethical review of experimental protocols, advising on the ethical aspects of healthcare practice, and ethics consultation. In this article the authors examine the current situation of ethics committees in Belgium from the perspective of clinical ethics. Firstly, the most impor...

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In treating dying patients, who by virtue of their physical and emotional situation are frail and vulnerable, physicians must meet a high standard of professional, ethical care. Such a standard is based upon a philosophy of care that recognizes the patients' inherent worth as human beings and their uniqueness as individuals. The ethical and virtuous physician will practice in accordance with th...

Increasing numbers of ethical trade initiatives are being launched, reflecting concerns about the limited benefits that globalisation brings to producers in developing countries. Ethical trade is an informationintensive activity yet little is known about the role of information systems in supporting this activity. Ethical trade – with its voluntary codes and consumer campaigns – also represents...

Rapid transformation in marketing information technologies has enabled corporations to build ample consumer databases and analyze those using sophisticated data-mining techniques to obtain extensive knowledge about those consumers’ personal life styles and private matters. Considering that the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has relied on fair information principles to guide privac...

The World Psychiatric Association (WPA) Section of Old Age Psychiatry, since 1997, has developed Consensus Statements relevant to the practice of Old Age Psychiatry. Since 2006 the Section has worked to develop a Consensus Statement on Ethics and Capacity in older people with mental disorders, which was completed in Prague, September 2008, prior to the World Congress in Psychiatry. This Consens...

Few residency training programmes explicitly require substantive exposure to issues in medical ethics and fewer still have a formal curriculum in this area. Traditional undergraduate medical ethics courses teach preclinical students to identify ethical issues and analyse them at a theoretical level. Residency training, however, is the ideal time to establish the critical behavioural link which ...