Pharmacists as one of health-care providers face ethical issues in terms of pharmaceutical care, relationship with patients and cooperation with the health-care team. Other than pharmacy, there are pharmaceutical companies in various fields of manufacturing, importing or distributing that have their own ethical issues. Therefore, pharmacy practice is vulnerable to ethical challenges and needs s...

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...

We describe the structure, operation, and experience of the Massachusetts General Hospital ethics committee, formally called the Edwin H. Cassem Optimum Care Committee, from January 2007 through December 2013. Founded in 1974 as one of the nation's first hospital ethics committees, this committee has primarily focused on the optimum use of life-sustaining treatments. We outline specific sociode...

nursing is a universal health care necessity. nursing profession, similar to the other medical professions, is responsible to maintain public health promotion, prevent diseases, and also care and rehabilitate client, family and the soci¬ety. the inher-ent nature of nursing is respect for moral values and human rights. however, clinical ethical dilem¬mas occur for nurses at all levels, not alway...

BACKGROUND Patients today interact with physicians, physician groups, and health plans, each of which may follow distinct ethical guidelines. METHOD We systematically compared physician codes of ethics with ethics policies at physician group practices and health plans, using the 1998-99 policies of 38 organisations-18 medical associations (associations), nine physician group practices (groups...

Background: Patients today interact with physicians, physician groups, and health plans, each of which may follow distinct ethical guidelines. Method: We systematically compared physician codes of ethics with ethics policies at physician group practices and health plans, using the 1998–99 policies of 38 organisations—18 medical associations (associations), nine physician group practices (groups...

While patients and their families often expect their physicians to discuss the options in end-of-life care,1 medical students and residents often feel unprepared to perform this task in clinical practice.2 At times, health care providers may disagree with patients or their families about the direction this end of life care should take. Learners often desire more organized instruction during the...

BACKGROUND Moral case deliberation (MCD) as a form of clinical ethics support is usually implemented in health care institutions and educational programs. While there is no previous research on the use of clinical ethics support on the level of health care regulation, employees of regulatory bodies are regularly confronted with moral challenges. This pilot study describes and evaluates the use ...

CONTEXT Ethics consultations increasingly are being used to resolve conflicts about life-sustaining interventions, but few studies have reported their outcomes. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether ethics consultations in the intensive care setting reduce the use of life-sustaining treatments delivered to patients who ultimately did not survive to hospital discharge, as well as the reactions to t...