By Sally Barker and Zoë Fritz The Westminster Parliament is currently considering Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which would make doctors both gatekeepers and facilitators of an assisted death for eligible terminally ill adults. The legislation proposes that doctors are involved at several stages of the process. Firstly, they must listen […]
Category: clinical ethics
The New Gatekeepers: the role of the UK High Court in the oversight of medical assistance in dying
By Sean R. Riley After decades of unsuccessful attempts by advocates, in November 2024, the United Kingdom House of Commons passed a second reading of a bill permitting medical assistance-in-dying (MAiD). The bill still faces a long legislative road before royal assent, but MAiD may very well be a reality for English and Welsh terminally […]
Do ecological preferences belong to patient autonomy? The answer is yes
By Sabine Salloch Healthcare is being increasingly recognized as a major emitter of greenhouse gases in industrialized societies. It accounts for approximately 5 percent of national carbon budgets. Whereas some countries already adopted national climate strategies targeting at a net-zero healthcare other governments still struggle with finding appropriate pathways. This is not surprising as, on […]
Clinical ethics: looking backwards, thinking forwards
By R Mohindra, S Louw Our paper is primarily an audit of the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals Clinical Ethics Advisory Group (CEAG). But it has several threads including: The nature of the workflow for the clinical ethics committee including volume and complexity over time; The impact of the relatively recent changes, including principles of approach, […]
Making visible the invisible elements of clinical ethics consultation
By Clare Delany, Sharon Feldman, Barbara Kameniar, and Lynn Gillam. In our article, ‘Making clinical ethics facilitation visible and accessible: Seven steps of the Critical Dialogue method of Ethics Consultation’, we detail our method of clinical ethics facilitation, broken down into seven steps. We also share the rationale for the various steps, and provide concrete […]
What does it mean to diagnose and live with cancer risk?
By Elspeth Davies In the past, people only became patients when they felt unwell and visited their doctor in search of remedies. In recent decades, a shift towards prevention in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has meant that people can become patients on the basis of their future risk of disease, rather than only […]
There is no health on a dead planet
By Rammina Yassaie and Lucy Brooks Our paper “Reassessing ‘Good’ Medical Practice and the Climate Crisis” takes an ethical dive into the roles and responsibilities of the medical profession and the medical regulator, in light of the climate and ecological crisis and its profound implications for health. The health sector has been called to action […]
Martha’s Rule and trust in healthcare: Beyond the ‘right’ to a second opinion
By Isabel Hanson. After the tragic death of thirteen-year-old Martha Mills in the UK, Martha’s mother Merope Mills said that she was told to “’Trust the doctors’… It turned out to be the worst advice I will receive in my whole life”. Martha had developed sepsis from an abdominal injury. Her mother knew that something […]
To care or not to care
By Victoria Min-Yi Wang and Brian Baigrie. The idea for our paper, Caring as the Unacknowledged Matrix of Evidence-Based Nursing, germinated in a philosophy of medicine graduate class that Brian was teaching and Victoria was attending. As a group, we discussed what counts as evidence in medicine, how values do and should enter into clinical […]
The moral vulnerability of clinician teams
By Bernadette Wren. The authority of clinicians is underpinned by a responsibility to ensure that all treatment decisions are made at the intersection of evidence, law and ethics. We hear a lot in the public square about the science and practice of evidence-gathering, much of it unrealisable. And occasionally the law gets a look-in. But […]