daniels, porteny and urrutia et al make a good case for the idea that that public decisions ought to be made not only “in the light of” evidence but also “on the basis of” budget impact, financial protection and equity. health technology assessment (hta) should, they say, be accordingly expanded to consider matters additional to safety and cost-effectiveness. they also complain that most hta re...

BACKGROUND Discussions on ethical aspects of life-and-death decisions within the hospital are often made in plenary. The prehospital physician, however, may be faced with ethical dilemmas in life-and-death decisions when time-critical decisions to initiate or refrain from resuscitative efforts need to be taken without the possibility to discuss matters with colleagues. Little is known whether t...

Local review of research by ethics committees in the UK has long been held to be an important right of the local research ethics committee and, even with the introduction of the European Clinical Trials Directive, the governance arrangements for research ethics committees continue to allow for local review of multicentre studies. There is no requirement for local review in either the European U...

Article history: Received: 18-06-2015 Revised: 24-09-2015 Accepted: 11-11-2015

BACKGROUND In 2008 UK legislation was amended to enable the use of deferred consent for paediatric emergency care (EC) trials in recognition of the practical and ethical difficulties of obtaining prospective consent in an emergency situation. However, ambiguity about how to make deferred consent acceptable to parents, children and practitioners remains. In particular, little is known about prac...

Advances in AI techniques and computing platforms have triggered a lively and expanding discourse on ethical decision-making by autonomous agents. Much recent work in AI concentrates on the challenges of moral decision making from a decision-theoretic perspective, and especially the representation of various ethical dilemmas. Such approaches may be useful but in general are not productive becau...

The intensive care unit (ICU) is the most common place to die. Also, ethical conflicts among stakeholders occur frequently in the ICU. Thus, ICU clinicians should be competent in all aspects for ethical decision-making. Major sources of conflicts are behavioral issues, such as verbal abuse or poor communication between physicians and nurses, and end-of-life care issues including a lack of respe...