given the importance of patient's rights in healthcare, special attention has been given to the concept of patient's rights by the ministry of health and medical education in iran. iranian patient's rights charter has been compiled with a novel and comprehensive approach. this charter aims to elucidate rights of recipients of health services as well as observing ethical standards in medicine. t...

daily development of the human knowledge, promotion of biomedical technologies and improvement of physicians' ability in diagnosis and treatment of different types of diseases have always accompanied plenty of discussions and challengeable subjects, especially from the view point of ethical issues. obtaining deep and accurate recognition of these subjects, the attention of the physicians and th...

in the last few years, medical education policy makers have expressed concern about changes in the ethical attitude and behavior of medical trainees during the course of their education. they claim that newly graduated physicians (mds) are entering residency years with inappropriate habits and attitudes earned during their education. this allegation has been supported by numerous research on th...

A personal reflection upon a career in medical ethics leads to four conclusions on what makes for 'good medical ethics'. Good medical ethics is practical in approach, philosophically well grounded, cross disciplinary, and while it might not be a necessary feature, the experience of the author suggests that it is the work of 'good people'.

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...

Without imagination-without an actively cultivated imagination-not only do health care workers themselves suffer, but so too do their patients, argues Dr Anne Scott in this issue of the journal.' 2 Why? Because only by being able to imagine what it is like to be the other person, the patient, only by being able to enter imaginatively into the world of the patient, is the health care professiona...

There are four principles of medical ethics; Beneficence, Respect for autonomy, Non-maleficence, and Justice. It is not easy to apply to principles of medical ethics in the special circumstances of obstetrics and gynecology. Student doctors must learn to be familiar with principles of medical ethics tailored to the special circumstances while the obstetrics and gynecology practice.

This paper responds to Dr Cassell's requestfor a fuller explanation ofmy argument in the paper, Against medical ethics: a philosopher's view. A distinction is made between two accounts of ethics in general, and the philosophical basis of health work ethics is briefly stated. The implications of applying this understanding of ethics to medical education are

BACKGROUND Ethics committees and their system of research protocol peer-review are currently used worldwide. To ensure an international standard for research ethics and safety, however, data is needed on the quality and function of each nation's ethics committees. The purpose of this study was to describe the characteristics and developments of ethics committees established at medical schools a...