BACKGROUND: In biomedical journals, authors are expected to report if the study wascarried out in accordance with international and national ethical guidelines and informreaders if approval from ethics committee was obtained and if written informed consentwas taken from the participant or legal guardian. AIMS: To determine the proportion ofresearch manuscripts in two pediatric j...

PURPOSE Independent ethical review committees safeguard participants in human research. The purpose of this study was to describe the current ethical guidelines for human research requirements in the Instructions to Authors of the English language medical journals previously studied in 1995. METHODS The instructions to authors of English language medicine journals from the Abridged Index Medi...

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES Coinciding with the recent implementation in Italy of the "Directive 2010/63/EU, regarding the protection of animals used for scientific purposes", the Authors would like to analyse the topic of the introduction of ethical committees for animal experimentation in Italy. This paper furthermore aims to underline some critical aspects concerning the actions taken by Ita...

Biological samples collected in biobanks are a resource with significant research potential. The Italian Joint Group CNB - CNBBSV (National Committee of Bioethics - National Committee for Biosecurity, Biotechnologies and Life Sciences) published a document reporting recommendations on storage and use of dried blood spot (DBS) and on the development of a National Network of Regional Newborn Scre...

The education of health care professionals is essential to maintaining standards of medical competence and access to care by patients. Inherent in the education of health care professionals is the problem of disparity in power and authority, including the power of teachers over learners and the power of practitioners over patients. Although there is a continuum of supervision levels and indepen...

The following amendments to the 2002 "Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct" (the Ethics Code; American Psychological Association, 2002) were adopted by the APA Council of Representatives at its February 2010 meeting. The changes involve the last two sentences of the final paragraph of the Introduction and Applicability section and Ethical Standards 1.02 and 1.03. The amendmen...

Despite the relatively recent advent of organizational ethics committees--created to address operational concerns that are not always appropriate for a clinical ethics committee to take on--there remain impediments (such as time constraints, limited ethical expertise, lack of senior leaders at the table, and waning interest of members) to the impact such a group might have. Committed to address...

Ethics committees are the most important practical instrument of clinical ethics in Belgium and fulfil three tasks: the ethical review of experimental protocols, advising on the ethical aspects of healthcare practice, and ethics consultation. In this article the authors examine the current situation of ethics committees in Belgium from the perspective of clinical ethics. Firstly, the most impor...

As clinical ethicists and ethics committee members, we strive to create the ideal situation for moral conversation and ethical reflection. Using both the familiar foundation and the fuller sense, the ethicist and ethics committee are aided in participating more fruitfully in a process of resolution. The familiar foundation represents a body of knowledge that ethics consultants and ethics commit...