By Nataly Papadopoulou. As a society and as individuals, we face challenges in dealing with debilitating, horrible diseases causing suffering, indignity, and loss of autonomy. With increased emphasis on individual autonomy in a clinical but also in a legal setting, some patients wish to control the end of their lives. Perhaps one of the most […]
Category: Medical ethics
Healthcare must stop ignoring future patients!
By Christian Munthe, Davide Fumagalli and Erik Malmqvist Most countries with publicly funded healthcare systems have ethically informed priority setting schemes to decide how to allocate scarce resources. Established principles in such schemes recognise patients’ need of care, the effects of interventions, and background requirements of equal consideration and cost-effectiveness. However, the typical use of […]
Why your doctor may be right to not tell you about your abnormal results
By Patrick Burch. As a GP I spend a significant proportion of time interpreting blood results. When a patient has any test performed, they should understand why it is being done and have consented to it. However, in many cases, perhaps the majority, patients are not fully aware what blood tests are being done and […]
Ensuring equity in vascularized composite allotransplantation
By Laura L. Kimberly, Elie P. Ramly, and Eduardo D. Rodriguez Vascularized composite allotransplantation (VCA) can be considered the innovative cousin of solid organ transplantation. VCA is the transplantation of multiple tissues, such as skin, muscle, nerve, and bone as a functional unit. This includes facial, upper and lower extremity, uterine, penile and abdominal wall […]
Do No Harm in cancer screening programmes: can consent save the day?
By Lotte Elton Screening might harm you. That isn’t what the adverts will tell you. But, increasingly, there is a growing awareness that, for some, cancer screening might lead to unnecessary and potentially harmful investigations and treatments. This seems to violate the ethical principle of non-maleficence: the injunction that doctors ‘do no harm’ to their […]
What end of life care do we want to give to persons with end-stage dementia?
By Joseph Dimech, Emmanuel Agius, Julian C Hughes and Paul Bartolo. Dementia is a degenerative neurocognitive disorder that leads to a high level of physical and cognitive disability as the disease progresses to its end-stage. Such patients are also at high risk of suffering from co-morbidities, including aspiration pneumonia secondary to swallowing difficulties. Thus, such […]
Centring choice in birthing services; COVID-19 and maternal request caesarean sections
By Anna Nelson & Elizabeth Chloe Romanis During the COVID-19 pandemic pregnant and birthing people saw significant changes to the services they were offered. From March 2020 substantial restrictions were introduced in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus, with some notable examples including bans on partners attending scans, limitations on the number […]
Surgery in COVID-19 Crisis Conditions: Can We Protect Our Ethical Integrity Against the Odds?
By J Macleod, S Mezher and R Hasan Since the dawn of the COVID-19 crisis, drastic changes have swept across many organisations. Healthcare providers are particularly affected by this; which we have experienced first-hand working in cardiac surgery. Working in this constantly evolving situation inevitably leads to uncertainty, inconsistency and even fear despite the best […]
Can COVID-19 re-invigorate ethics?
By Louise Campbell The COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted ethics into the spotlight. Questions previously deliberated about by small numbers of people interested in or affected by particular issues are now being posed with an unprecedented urgency right across the public domain. One of the interesting facets of this development is the way in which the […]
Setting ourselves up for failure: a pandemic of our own making
By Ezio Di Nucci The COVID-19 pandemic is of our own making – but maybe not in the way you think. Let me explain why, taking Italy as case study. COVID-19 overwhelmingly kills vulnerable people, older or chronic multi-morbidity patients: the mean age of COVID-19 fatalities in Italy according to the most recent data was […]