By Charles Foster The Supreme Court has recently, in An NHS Trust v Y decided that adherence to guidelines produced by various medical organisations will safeguard adequately against inappropriate withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from patients in vegetative state/Minimally Conscious State. I have criticised that decision in detail in an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics […]
Category: clinical ethics
Access to Primary Care in a ‘Hostile Environment’
By Rose Glennerster and Nathan Hodson Last month 20 British doctors returned the medals they received in recognition of their work during the Ebola crisis. They were protesting against the extensions of the government’s “hostile environment” policy into healthcare, highlighting the case of Albert Thompson, a Windrush migrant who had lived in the UK for […]
We need more arguments in clinical ethics
By Melanie Jansen Ethics is a philosophical discipline. The bedrock of philosophical scholarship is the construction of arguments – a set of reasons that justify a particular position. Philosophers spend years cultivating critical reasoning skills and applying them to many and varied problems. While philosophy has universal application, it is often erroneously perceived as an […]
Advance decisions in dementia: when the past conflicts with the present
By George Gillett Last month, the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee wrote an article in support of assisted dying. She wrote about Katherine Whitehorn, her former colleague at the Observer. Describing Whitehorn, Toynbee writes: She is not herself. Her old self would not recognise herself in this other being who sits in the care home. What […]
A sales rep and a doctor walk into a theatre – why this is no joke
By Quinn Grundy, Katrina Hutchison, Jane Johnson, Brette Blakely, Robyn Clay-Wlliams, Bernadette Richards, Wendy A Rogers Imagine that your elderly mother undergoes a hip replacement. During the post-operative appointment, the surgeon informs your mother that an error has been made: the two parts of the joint implant, a ball and socket, are mismatched. He explains that […]
A Moral Framework for Living Donor Transplantation
By Lainie Friedman Ross and J. Richard Thistlethwaite Living donor transplantation has been controversial since its inception because it exposes donors to medical risks for the medical benefit of their intended recipients. The usual bioethics argument about the moral permissibility of living kidney donation focuses on the concept of respect for persons which is often […]
A Novel Approach to Compassionate Use Allocation
By Lisa Kearns, Alison S. Bateman-House, Arthur L. Caplan, J. Russell Teagarden When seriously ill patients cannot enroll in clinical trials and have run out of treatment options, they may ask pharmaceutical manufacturers for “compassionate use” of their drugs in development, knowing that the drugs are experimental and may not help. These are tricky decisions for […]
Organismal death, the dead donor rule and the ethics of vital organ procurement
Guest Authors: Xavier Symons, Institute for Ethics and Society, University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Reginald Mary Chua, Philosophy, Catholic Theological College, East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Paper: Organismal death, the dead donor rule and the ethics of vital organ procurement The brain death criterion for death (as it is currently understood in medical practice) was first propounded in 1968 by an […]
Conflicts of duty: What do they mean?
Guest Post Author: Andreas Eriksen, ARENA, Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; SPS, Centre for the Study of Professions, Oslo and Akershus University College, Oslo, Norway Paper: Conflicting duties and restitution of the trusting relationship Medical professionals constantly face hard cases in their interaction with patients, colleagues, and the public. They are torn between different considerations and exposed to seemingly […]
What Makes an Emergency?
By Iain Brassington Stanley Cavell died a few days ago. He is, I suspect, not widely known among medical ethicists, and is cited less. Fair enough: medical ethics wasn’t his thing. It’s a shame, though, because his work did strike me as being worth getting to know. This is not to say that I was familiar […]