The passage from a posture of clinician to that of clinician-bioethicist poses significant challenges for health professionals, most notably with regards to theoretical or epistemological views of complex ethical impasses encountered in clinical settings. Apprehending these situations from the only clinical perspective of the nurse or the doctor, for example, can be very unproductive to help so...

Ethics questions and conflicts will always be commonplace in rural health care practices. Despite the ethics knowledge and skills that clinicians and administrators may possess, ethics conflicts are stressful and time-consuming because of the inherent uncertainty surrounding such conflicts. To manage the potential negative effect of ethics conflicts, health care professionals and institutions s...

OBJECTIVE To identify the consultation activities of clinical ethics committees (CECs) in the UK and the views of CEC chairpersons regarding such activities. METHODS An anonymous, password-protected online questionnaire was sent by e-mail to 70 CEC chairpersons. The questionnaire contained 14 items. RESULTS Of the 70 CECs contacted, 30 responded (a response rate of 43%). There has been an a...

The clinical case conference has been a hallmark of undergraduate and graduate medical education for decades and affords attendees the opportunity to hear about interesting and difficult cases and to learn from a discussion of the complexities of diagnosis and treatment. In forensic psychiatry, the complexities in a case conference also extend to the formation of a forensic opinion. The applica...