In 1992, the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations ( JCAHO) passed a mandate that all its approved hospitals put in place a means for addressing ethical concerns. Although the particular process the hospital uses to address such concerns—ethics consultant, ethics forum, ethics committee—may vary, the hospital or healthcare ethics committee (HEC) is used most often. I...

OBJECTIVES To report the outcome of applications to 43 research ethics committees. SETTING Four regional health authorities in England. FINDINGS The research ethics committees varied considerably in their practices. The time lapse until notification of the outcome of the approval ranged from just under one week to 23 weeks with a mean of 8.6 weeks. Four research ethics committees failed to ...

Ethics has become a particularly relevant topic for discussion and a subject for serious study. It has a very long tradition, of course; but nowadays one hears frequently of the need, because of abuses or concerns, to formulate and adopt ethical codes in various areas or professions. Advances in science and technology resulting in new developments in various fields, including medicine, have pre...

Medical ethics education remains an important venue of moral education. In spite of the intensity of these efforts, the desired outcomes of medical ethics education remain obscure, undefined and largely untested. In the first part of this study, the goals of medical ethics are operationalized along cognitive, behavioral and attitudinal dimensions. This includes a written moral judgment test, a ...

On 9 August 1994 the German legislature revised the German Drug Law (AMG). Included in the revision is a passage requiring, for the first time, that the sponsors and investigators of clinical studies involving human subjects first obtain the approval of an ethics committee before carrying out such studies. According to the legislation, which takes effect on 17 August 1995, approval is to come f...

OBJECTIVES The objective of this research is to analyse the evolution and nature of published empirical research in the fields of medical ethics and bioethics. DESIGN Retrospective quantitative study of nine peer reviewed journals in the field of bioethics and medical ethics (Bioethics, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Hastings Center Report, Journal of Clinical Ethics, Journal of Me...

A virtue centred approach to ethics has been criticized for being vague owing to the nature of its central concept, the paradigm person. From the perspective of the practitioner the most damaging charge is that virtue ethics fails to be action guiding and, in addition to this, it does not offer any means of act appraisal. These criticisms leave virtue ethics in a weak position vis-à-vis traditi...

This article presents a summary of existing codes of media ethics and analyzes their impact on mass media practices. It then attempts to develop an Islamic perspective of mass media ethics by focusing on the moral guidelines provided by Quran and the tradition of Prophet Muhammad (the Sunnah). The paper also examines the issues, problems, and challenges in operationalizing these guidelines into...

Ethics has am'ved in the business school curriculum. But what about the cumculum offinance?Can ethics be integratedin anymeaningful wayinto the theory and pedagogy of finance? Given the ever-broader array of topics in finance, should ethics be included at the inevitable expense ofsomething else? Are finance instructors qualified to teach ethics any more than ethicists are qualified to teach fin...

Society, even outside of the field of science and medicine, is faced with ethical dilemmas every day in which people are forced to take a stance and make difficult decisions. However, the question becomes where do these decisions come from? What are ethics? And is there bias involved in the drawing of these ethical conclusions? Philosophers have been pondering these questions for centuries and ...