Ethics committee and ethics consultants are among the more interesting phenomena associated with bioethics. Although in some respects both reach back to the ancient origins of medical ethics, in other ways they are reflections of a ‘postmodern’ society that seeks moral resolutions while remaining agnostic about substantive moral absolutes. In the present article I shall describe the history of ...

OBJECTIVES To study knowledge and attitudes of hospital ethics committee members at the first workshop for ethics committees in Croatia. DESIGN Before/after cross-sectional study using a self administered questionnaire. SETTING Educational workshop for members of hospital ethics committees, Zagreb, 2003. MAIN OUTCOME MEASUREMENTS Knowledge and attitudes of participants before and after th...

It is nearly forty years since the first committees were established to review the ethical acceptability of research using animals. Drivers for the establishment of these committees were the recognition that such activities presented ethical challenges and that, given the level of controversy in the wider community, scientists needed to demonstrate responsibility and accountability for their ac...

BACKGROUND During the last three decades, ethics committees have been formed with a growing trend. These committees have a satisfactory and effective impact on the pattern of patient care and its performance. The medical ethics committee is considered one of the most active committees in hospitals, having the aim of providing necessary approaches for the optimal use of the findings in empirical...

Regulatory and ethical guidelines require clinical trial sponsors to disseminate clinical trial adverse event reports to involved investigators and human research ethics committees. Compliance with these guidelines has resulted in a major administrative burden for ethics committees. This burden does not necessarily contribute to the protection of clinical trial participants. Rationalisation of ...

Knowledge of the heterosexual spread of HIV is needed to plan future health-care needs. In December 1989 we gained approval and finance for unlinked anonymous testing of neonatal Guthrie card samples in Scotland. Local ethics committee approval was required before testing could start. Twenty ethics committees were approached in the 15 Scottish health board areas. Nineteen of the committees have...

More than 60 percent of hospitals have ethics committees. The wide-scale, voluntary adoption of these committees by hospitals is surprising, given the lack of data on their effectiveness. Little effort has been made to evaluate such committees, in part because of the lack of consensus on their purpose. The argument presented here is that, from a policy perspective, the committees' purpose must ...

The creation of a national ethics committee in Britain has been proposed to overcome some of the problems that researchers conducting multi-center trials encounter in dealing with numerous local ethics committees. Drury identifies three disadvantages to this proposal: 1) it might weaken the authority of local committees; 2) the present system works well by creating ad hoc ethics committees to...