The legal and ethical requirements related to an anaesthetist's communication with patients in preparing them for anaesthesia, assisting them in making appropriate decisions and obtaining consent in a formal sense are complex. Doing these things well takes time, skill and sensitivity. The primary focus should be to adequately prepare patients for surgery and to ensure that they are sufficiently...

While there is widespread agreement on the broad aspects of what constitutes a biobank, there is much disagreement regarding the precise definition. This research aimed to describe and analyze the definitions of the term biobank offered by various stakeholders in biobanking. Interviews were conducted with 36 biobanking stakeholders with international experience currently working in Switzerland....

PURPOSE To describe the components of a proper informed consent; which risks must be disclosed and which need not; additional safeguards for incapacitated persons, minors, and research subjects; and where the law will imply consent that is not otherwise obtained. METHODS Summarization of current law obtained from legal treatises, reports of recent cases, and personal experience as a reviewer ...

Aphasia centers are in an excellent position to contribute to the broad definition of health by the World Health Organization: the ability to live life to its full potential. An expansion of this definition by the World Health Organization International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) forms the basis for a user-friendly and ICF-compatible framework for planning interv...

BACKGROUND Data sharing presents several challenges to the informed consent process. Unique challenges emerge when sharing pediatric or pregnancy-related data. Here, parent preferences for sharing non-biological data are examined. METHODS Groups (n = 4 groups, 18 participants) and individual interviews (n = 19 participants) were conducted with participants from two provincial, longitudinal pr...

BACKGROUND Increased detection of tuberculosis (TB) using intensified or active case finding (ICF) is one of the cornerstones of the Stop TB Strategy, and contrasts with passive case finding (PCF) which relies on self-reported symptoms. There is no clear guidance on implementation strategies. We implemented ICF in addition to ongoing PCF in our large urban HIV clinic in July 2010 using a twice-...

Ethical core issues in research with human subjects are related to informed consent and risk-benefit assessment. This is valid for all types of studies. However, there has been much greater focus of ethical considerations on controlled clinical trials than on naturalistic trials, probably because the former are interventional in nature and may have unknown and perhaps severe somatic risks, wher...

Nearly all twin registers are based in developed countries and there is no twin register in the developing world. Our objectives were to initiate the process of establishing a nationwide twin register in Sri Lanka by starting a volunteer register first and working towards a population-based register. Regular newspaper advertisements, feature articles, radio talks, and television programmes were...