By Jonathan Michaels. Healthcare decisions are complex, whether we are considering individual choices about our own health, or policy decisions made by political or professional bodies. Disease and the actions taken to prevent, diagnose and treat it, may have widespread ramifications on all aspects of our lives. Furthermore, policy and personal decisions in other aspects […]
Latest articles
Lateral flow tests and schools: Why the government’s approach is ethically flawed
By Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu. The UK government has put lateral flow antigen tests (LFATs) at the forefront of its strategy to re-open schools. These tests can be used to detect current infections, and they can provide results quickly at the point of care. The tests themselves also have a low financial […]
You’ve got to be in it to win it: The promise and practice of vaccine lotteries
By Jane Williams, Chris Degeling, Angus Dawson, Stacy Carter Following the 2009 H1N1 pandemic there was a small explosion in the ethics literature on how to allocate scarce pandemic vaccine. There were many different suggestions about how we should distribute vaccine in an ethical way. One proposal was that a random allocation through a lottery, weighted […]
Up close and personal: Using AI to predict patient preferences?
By Nikola Biller-Andorno. Have you ever tried to put together a ballpoint pen that has fallen apart? Or, more ambitiously, tried to repair your child’s programmable toy robot that continues to bump into walls? There is nothing like building, taking apart and rebuilding to understand a gadget or system’s flaws and weaknesses. This is what […]
Connecting the Dots: COVID-19, BAME Communities, and Racial Injustice
By Aileen Editha The COVID-19 pandemic impacted England (and the world) in ways that no one could have imagined. One that is incredibly disappointing, however, is the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities in terms of exposure and mortality rates, as well as the recent data on vaccination […]
Informed consent and medical device registries
By Daniel B. Kramer, Elizabeth Roe and Efthimios Parasidis. Regulators charged with evaluating new medical devices face several unenviable trade-offs. Extensive pre-market evaluation may delay market entry for useful technology, but a rushed assessment may fail to identify important safety concerns. Rigorous post-market studies may help balance these competing concerns, but must also weigh the […]
Is it irrational not to have a plan? Should there have been national guidance on rationing in the NHS?
By Dominic Wilkinson and Jonathan Pugh. Last April, in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of academics, lawyers, doctors and ethicists wrote publicly about the need for national ethical guidance relating to resource allocation (e.g., see here, here, here). At the time there was concern that there would be insufficient intensive care […]
Modern healthcare and trusting LGBT testimony
By Maura Priest Historically speaking, medical experts have dismissed, downplayed, and doubted, LGBT testimony. Along these lines, it was just a short time ago that the medical community understood LGBT identities as illnesses to be treated and cured. While both societal acceptance of the LGBT community, and also LGBT healthcare, have improved over time, even […]
Is the conceptualisation of trust in NHS’ code of conduct for artificial intelligence problematic?
By Soogeun S Lee. In 2018, the UK government published a Code of Conduct, hereafter the Code, for using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the NHS. The Code contains ten principles that outline a gold-standard of ethical conduct of AI developers and implementers within the NHS. Considering the importance of trust in traditional medical practice, […]
Who should get to choose their surrogates?
By Mark Christopher Navin, Jason Adam Wasserman, Devan Stahl, and Tom Tomlinson, Clinical ethics consultants regularly witness something like the following progression: A patient is determined to lack decision-making capacity (DMC). In the absence of an Advanced Care Planning document that names a surrogate decision maker (e.g. a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care), […]