Professional practice in health care inevitably involves difficult ethical considerations that are often embedded in universal events: birth, periods of ill health, and death. Clinicians may be unsure in these situations about what exactly they should do. In light of this circumstance, ethics should no longer be an implicit component of Australian health care, but instead be explicitly recognis...

This essay, written from my non-doctor's 'lay' perspective, sketches a gradually improving approach to medical ethics over the 40-year period since this journal was founded. A central feature of this improvement has been the increasing focus of medical ethics on the interests and perspectives of the patients/clients/consumers/service users, whose interests doctors and other healthcare workers s...

Clinical ethics committees (CECs) are well established in North America where they are known as hospital or health care ethics committees. Similar groups and other kinds of clinical ethics support are now developing in Europe. This supplement to the Journal of Medical Ethics provides an overview of the issues arising from the provision of clinical ethics support services, and clinical ethics co...

As a teacher educator, I sought to understand how cultivate care ethics in my online teaching over three-year period. Through surveys, student work, interviews, course materials and journal, video-ed synchronous class sessions with seven cohorts of candidates, the lenses revealed particular challenges possibilities for authentic modeling through story, practice continuity, dialogue, addressing ...