By: Eva-Maria Frittgen, Joschka Haltaufderheide During the first waves of the COVID-pandemic, videoconferencing quickly became one of the preferred ways of communicating. This was also the way how we as authors first met (and have met ever since without ever meeting in person) and started to think about the use of video-based consultations in healthcare: […]
Latest articles
Who gets to decide when I can’t? End of life decision-making and deceased donation
By Dominique E. Martin and Shih-Ning Then Most of us have ideas about how we want decisions to be made at the end of our lives, and some of us also have strong views about donating our organs and tissues after we die. Many of us appoint a loved one to make decisions on our […]
Let the patient speak! The need for patient-developed concepts of empowerment
By Brenda Bogaert We talk so much about patient empowerment today that it is hard to imagine that the concept only became part of healthcare policy in the past few decades. How did patient empowerment come to be discussed and conceptualised? And what has been the patient’s involvement in this process? Firstly, it is important […]
Should resident physicians in the United States unionize?
By Arjun S Byju and Kajsa A Mayo The coronavirus pandemic in the United States has offered ample opportunity for those in medicine to reflect upon the nation’s healthcare system and its various shortcomings in delivering care during a time of crisis. As the term “essential worker” made its way into the public lexicon, the […]
Neonatology’s brave new world
By Phillip Wozniak, Ashley Fernandes Could a live baby outside its mother’s womb remain “unborn?” On its face, it seems like an absurd question, but scientific advancement in the field of neonatology has made answering this question a priority. In 2017, Dr. Emily Partridge and her colleagues at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia published the […]
Helping global neighbors during the COVID-19 pandemic
By Nancy S. Jecker, Aaron G. Wightman, Douglas S. Diekema Why should high-income nations help their global neighbors during a pandemic emergency? If they help, what is a just way to distribute the goods and services they make available? In “Vaccine Ethics: An Ethical Framework for Global Distribution of COVID-19 Vaccines,” we take up these […]
Against legalized abortion
By Perry Hendricks Suppose while you’re hiking in the mountains, you stumble upon a young infant. The infant is crying and clearly hungry. With no other humans in sight, you’re the only person able to help her (the infant). Fortunately, you have a bottle of milk with you, and you’re able to feed her. Nearly […]
Why we should not extend the 14-day rule
By Bruce P. Blackshaw In 1978, the first baby conceived by IVF was born in the UK, and public concern about how rapidly science was advancing resulted in a government inquiry being set up. It produced the Warnock Report, which recommended (amongst other things) that human embryos could be cultured in vitro for no longer […]
Lessons from pandemic priority-setting
By Keegan Guidolin, Jessica Marangos, Fayez Quereshy University Health Network (UHN) is the largest hospital system in Canada and delivers health services ranging from primary to quaternary care to over six-million people in the Greater Toronto Area and beyond. During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, like many other hospitals and in response to […]
Finding meaning in loss: family experience of research on imminently dying patients in the intensive care unit
By Amanda van Beinum, Nicholas Murphy, Charles Weijer, and Jennifer Chandler “…this study […] it was a way of […] making him live on, in certain ways, or be able to say, ‘hey my dad did this’ you know, we did this, and maybe some good will come out of it…” Intensive care units can […]