By Amanda Ward There is ambiguity to what extent Welfare Powers of Attorney (WPA) in Scotland can refuse or withhold consent to medical treatment. The primary legislation to be consulted is the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 (AWIA). A welfare power of attorney relates to decision making in relation to the granter’s personal and […]
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Co-producing ethics: thinking about trust
By Mark Sheehan. Our paper, ‘Trust, trustworthiness, and sharing patient data for research’ represents the outcome of a distinctive co-production method for doing applied philosophical work in bioethics. The paper is jointly authored by eight members of the public and two academic bioethicists (both with a background in philosophy) and emerges from a novel approach […]
BMJ Covid 19 free access research archive
By John McMillan The BMJ has produced an archive that collects all the Covid 19 research that has appeared in BMJ journals. All Covid 19 research is being published as freely available and that includes papers published in the JME. We are expediting the review and production of Covid 19 papers. Several significant papers are […]
What happens when a healthcare institution becomes a research subject?
By Jan Piasecki and Vilius Dranseika. Consider a hospital manager who works in a large hospital employing hundreds of medical professionals and receiving thousands of patients every day. When she is approached by a group of researchers, she faces a difficult decision. On the one hand, she and the staff of her hospital are committed […]
Don’t let the ethics of despair infect the intensive care unit
By David Shaw, Dan Harvey and Dale Gardiner. Coronavirus is a killer, and most countries have implemented measures to reduce this mortality. On the one hand, public health measures aim to limit the spread of the disease, and hence limit the number of people requiring hospitalisation; on the other, healthcare professionals working in intensive care […]
What’s in the applesauce? The ethics of covert administration of medication in food
By Megan Dean, Laura Guidry-Grimes and Elizabeth Victor. Do you know what’s in your food? Food is a site of physical and epistemic vulnerability for us all–we rely on often invisible others to produce, store, transport, prepare, and serve our food safely, without contamination or adulteration, and to be honest and accurate when describing and […]
A bird in the hand or two in the bush? On ethics of HCV screening in pregnancy
By Marielle Gross. Since the beginning of my medical career, the American opioid crisis-turned-epidemic made nearly daily headlines. It reflected a complex set of challenges for our healthcare system which concern me not only as a physician and surgeon, but as a bioethicist focused on dismantling “prejudice-based medicine.” It is a perfect storm of moneyed […]
How should we regulate child sex robots: restriction or experimentation?
By John Danaher This post is part of a series on ethical and legal perspectives in sexual and reproductive health first posted on the BMJ Sexual and Reproductive Health blog. In 2017, the Crown Prosecution Services (CPS) decided to clamp down on the importation of child sex dolls into the UK. In doing so, they faced […]
Justifying the Consequences of Trainee Medicine
By Connor Brenna and Sunit Das. Are we doing the best we can for our patients? At face-value, this seems to be a straightforward (albeit broad) question. In this piece, we dive deeper into the ethics of trainee medicine to find that the answer is really contingent on how one interprets who it is that […]
Conscientious objection and professional interpreters working in healthcare settings
By Nathan Emmerich and Christine Phillips. If one knows anything about the recent literature on conscientious objection in healthcare it is that there is a lot of it. Indeed, in the past few months two different journals have published special issues on the topic. Whilst this coverage is to be welcomed, and this complex topic […]