There are two very different ways of understanding access and care that are at work in contemporary American society. One of these is the understanding that our society's health professions have about access and care as they consider their ethical commitment to respond to patients' oral health needs. The other is how these matters are understood within America's public culture. In this view, ne...

Conceived as a solution to clinical dilemmas, and now required by organizations for hospital accreditation, ethics committees have been subject only to small-scale studies. The wide use of ethics committees and the diverse roles they have played compel study. In 1999 the University of Pennsylvania Ethics Committee Research Group (ECRG) completed the first national survey of the presence, compos...

Recent disclosures of failures of care in the National Health Service (NHS) in England have led to debates about compassion deficits disallowing health professionals to provide high quality responsive care. While the link between high quality care and compassion is often taken for granted, it is less obvious how compassion - often originating in the individual's emotional response - can become ...

HCE 550 Topics in Bioethics (3 credits) The course is an analysis of some of the important topics in bioethics. Students will familiarize themselves with the ethical questions surrounding major topics in contemporary bioethics. The course will focus on one or more of the following topics: medical research with human subjects, the new genetic medicine, social justice and the delivery of healthca...

BACKGROUND Internationally, clinical ethics support has yet to be implemented systematically in community health and care services. A large-scale Norwegian project (2007-2015) attempted to increase ethical competence in community services through facilitating the implementation of ethics support activities in 241 Norwegian municipalities. The article describes the ethics project and the ethics ...

BACKGROUND Emergency departments across the globe follow a triage system in order to cope with overcrowding. The intention behind triage is to improve the emergency care and to prioritize cases in terms of clinical urgency. DISCUSSION In emergency department triage, medical care might lead to adverse consequences like delay in providing care, compromise in privacy and confidentiality, poor ph...

Research activity in primary care is increasing rapidly, and raises a range of specific ethical issues. Many of these relate to the involvement of individuals in the community who are not seeking medical care and to the impact of research participation on relationships between general practitioners and their patients. The ethical issues pertinent to a range of quantitative and qualitative resea...

Primary Care Ethics is one of those books that healthcare professionals will share with their colleagues because it brings together a range of experiences that are often discussed informally with their peers, but rarely addressed in clinical training. It is not intended as a textbook of medical ethics, but rather a series of essays that are insightful, thought provoking, and informative in rais...