Rationing and life-saving treatments: should identifiable patients have higher priority?

Rationing and life-saving treatments: should identifiable patients have higher priority?

Health care systems across the world are unable to afford the best treatment for all patients in all situations. Choices have to be made. One key ethical issue that arises for health authorities is whether the principle of the "rule of rescue" should be adopted or rejected. According to this principle more funding should be available in order to save lives of identifiable, compared with unident...

The remedying of iron deficiency: what priority should it have?

Fe deficiency is considered to be the commonest of nutritional deficiencies worldwide. Adverse effects are stated to include lower growth rate and impaired cognitive scores in children and poor pregnancy outcome and lower working capacity in adults. In the present review, Fe intake, stores of the element, the magnitude of deficiencies and the benefits from interventions, as reflected in the res...

Saving lives, saving from death, saving from dying: reflections on 'over-valuing' identifiable victims.

Prospective payments to hospitals: Should emergency admissions have higher rates?

Systematic variation in patient resource use can be a significant problem for a system based on diagnosis-related groups (DRG's) if this variation is not evenly distributed across hospitals. If certain hospitals routinely treat patients who require more services than average under DRG's, the long-run financial viability of these hospitals will be threatened. In this study, the authors examine w...

Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life – should artificial systems have rights?

The defining features of intelligence, consciousness and life are not clearly prescribed. We cannot say of X that if, and only if, it has properties p, q and r will it also have intelligence, be alive, or be conscious. What we tend to look for when ascribing inner states to another system – I shall use the term ‘system’ to cover both organic and inorganic entities and I shall examine three diff...