hospital ethics committees (hecs) help clinicians deal with the ethical challenges which have been raised during clinical practice. a comprehensive literature review was conducted to provide a historical background of the development of hecs internationally and describe their functions and practical challenges of their day to day work. this is the first part of a comprehensive literature review...

Ethics consultation in institutions of the healthcare system has been given a standard form based on three pillars: education, the development of guidelines and concrete ethics consultation in case conferences. The spread of ethics committees, which perform these tasks on an organizational level, is a remarkable historic achievement. At the same time it cannot be denied that modern ethics consu...

In Australia there has been only limited experience with ethics consultation, and there are no reports of practical details. In 1999, the Institutional Clinical Ethics Committee at John Hunter Hospital, Newcastle, initiated an Acute Clinical Ethics Service (ACES) to formalise a perceived need within the hospital for ethics consultation. This need had previously been met by ad-hoc councils of "w...

Internal medicine residents at the University of Hawai'i were surveyed in 2005 to identify their attitudes regarding ethics consultation based on exposure to ethics education as part of residency training. Our hypotheses were that senior residents are more likely than interns to request an ethics consultation; and providing or forgoing life-sustaining treatment would outrank other situations fo...

Institutional ethics consultation services for biomedical scientists have begun to proliferate, especially for clinical researchers. We discuss several models of ethics consultation and describe a team-based approach used at Stanford University in the context of these models. As research ethics consultation services expand, there are many unresolved questions that need to be addressed, includin...

BACKGROUND Ethics consultation is used regularly by some doctors, whereas others are reluctant to use these services. AIM To determine factors that may influence doctors to request or not request ethics consultation. METHODS A survey questionnaire was distributed to doctors on staff at the University Community Hospital in Tampa, Florida, USA. The responses to the questions on the survey wer...