Ethics committees

Ethics committees and ethics consultants

Ethics committee and ethics consultants are among the more interesting phenomena associated with bioethics. Although in some respects both reach back to the ancient origins of medical ethics, in other ways they are reflections of a ‘postmodern’ society that seeks moral resolutions while remaining agnostic about substantive moral absolutes. In the present article I shall describe the history of ...

Developing clinical ethics committees.

Formal clinical ethics review first developed in the USA and most hospitals there have structures in place. This is often a clinical ethics committee. Developments have been slower in the UK, where there has been uncertainty and variability about the role of clinical ethics committees. Even in the USA, their exact role is uncertain. Although we now have a good idea of the mechanisms for ethical...

Ethical ethics committees?

Resuscitation and hospital ethics committees.

The article ‘The ethics of resuscitation’, published in ‘Anaesthesiology Intensive Therapy’ 3/2011, aroused much interest of the readers [1]. It deals with an important and often neglected issue of ethical dilemmas associated with decision making about the institution or otherwise of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The involvement of hospital ethics committees in ‘decision making about the insti...

Legal briefing: Healthcare ethics committees.

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving institutional healthcare ethics committees. This topic has been the subject of recent articles in JCE. Healthcare ethics committees have also recently been the subject of significant public policy attention. Disturbingly, Bobby Schindler and others have described ethics committees as "death panels." But most of the ...