The attendees at a meeting have different ways in which they get information and make decisions, different personal needs, and different ways in which they participate in groups. Some have counterproductive behaviors in committee meetings, such as attacking others, talking too long but not saying much, talking too little, deliberately ...

In contemporary Ethiopia, abortion decision-making is a challenging process involving moral and/or religious dilemmas, as well as considerations of health and safety. Amidst widespread condemnation of female premarital sex and clear moral sanction against induced abortion, young Ethiopian women are nevertheless sexually active and induced abortions are still sought and ...

The decision to deactivate a pacemaker in a pacing-dependent patient is troubling for some health professionals who may regard such interventions as hastening death and therefore ethically impermissible. This may be especially concerning in situations where a patient is unable to clearly state what their preferences may be and the ...

There are many components of a decision-making meeting. The role of the chairperson, important aspects of how to begin a meeting, the technique of brainstorming, and follow-up after a meeting are described in this article.

Meetings are held by leaders for many purposes, including conveying information, raising morale, asking for opinions, brain storming, making people part of the problem-solving process, building trust, getting to a consensus, and making decisions. However, many meetings waste time, some undermine the leader's power, and some decrease morale. Part I ...

Self-disclosure is an ever present and unavoidable aspect of psychotherapy. But, why, how, and when it is done requires careful forethought. The use of self-disclosure is discussed in the context of boundaries, highlighting its ethical and appropriate use in psychotherapy. Rather than avoiding self-disclosure out of a fear of violating ...

Medical ethical analysis remains dominated by the principlist account first proposed by Beauchamp and Childress. This paper argues that the principlist model is unreflective of how ethical decisions are taken in clinical practice. Two kinds of medical ethical decisions are distinguished: biosocial ethics and clinical ethics. It is argued that ...

The International Radiation Protection Association (IRPA) published their Guiding Principles for Radiation Protection Professionals on Stakeholder Engagement in February 2009. The publication of this document is the culmination of four years of work by the Spanish Society for Radiological Protection, the French Society of Radioprotection, the United Kingdom Society of ...

In this article, I study the challenges that make database and material bank sharing difficult for many researchers. I assert that if sharing is prima facie ethical (a view that I will defend), then any practices that limit sharing require justification. I argue that: 1) data and material sharing is ...

In this article we introduce a series of 8 case scenarios and commentaries and explore the complex legal, ethical, and clinical concerns that arise when pediatric patients and their parents or health care providers use or are interested in using complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). People around the world rely ...

Infusing evidence-based practice (EBP) into the clinical setting implies that professionals use evidence that is relevant and credible, maintain their pursuit of best current knowledge, respect their clients' preferences and values, and keep these clients and their families appropriately informed about their treatment options. Thus, rational and judicious EBP must ...

Resulting medical decision from a multidisciplinary team (MDT) meeting has to be accurate regarding to various patient criteria and relevant specialists participation. The target is to optimize treatment or management options for patients taking into account patients' benefit. The aim of our study was to examine quality criteria of MDT ...

Summary When the US Congress created the End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) Program in 1972, it gave physicians the responsibility of determining which patients were "appropriate" for dialysis. Congress provided no guidance on who should be selected or how. Only five years later, Dr. Belding Scribner, the father of chronic dialysis, ...

Most current ethical decision-making models provide a logical and reasoned process for making ethical judgments, but these models are empirically unproven and rely upon assumptions of rational, conscious, and quasilegal reasoning. Such models predominate despite the fact that many nonrational factors influence ethical thought and behavior, including context, perceptions, relationships, ...

Living organ donation requires hurting one person-at least physically-to help another. This can be morally justifiable if certain ethical criteria are met, among them voluntary and informed consent. In the existing guidance, voluntariness is usually vaguely defined as the absence of coercion. This, however, is not enough as a basis ...

The widespread inclusion of surgical strategies in the treatment of medically intractable epilepsy is largely justified by the medical and psychosocial burden of the illness. Performing these procedures in pediatric populations is associated with distinct challenges ranging from unique seizure etiologies to issues surrounding brain development and functional plasticity. As ...

Blood safety decision making has become increasingly complex, and a framework for risk-based decision making is, thus, needed. The purpose of this consensus conference was to bring together international experts in an effort to develop the foundations for such a framework. These proceedings are described with a view to making ...

This article describes how ethical issues in health are approached and resolved within the framework of Jewish bioethics. Its main purpose is to explore the range of sources and methodologies used to determine the appropriate hierarchy of values for various ethical scenarios. Its major thrust is to illustrate how a ...

In the face of the moral pluralism that results from the death of God and the abandonment of a God's eye perspective in secular philosophy, bioethics arose in a context that renders it essentially incapable of giving answers to substantive moral questions, such as concerning the permissibility of abortion, human ...

Mr I.N. Felicitous suffered a dense stroke after an urgent carotid endarterectomy 3 days ago. Presently he remains ventilator-dependent, with improving parameters. I.N. was an all-pro NFL quarterback until retirement a decade ago, when he started a chain of fitness clubs. Physical activity has been his life. He has regained ...

This paper provides an overview of bioethics governance in Israel through an analytical description of the legal framework for the interface between individuals and biomedical practices. There is no national agency with general oversight of bioethics policy and decision making, and the rules that apply to individual usage of biomedical ...

The Israeli law of abortions (1977) legally authorises hospital committees to decide upon women's requests for selective abortion. One of the law's clauses determines that abortions can be approved in cases of an embryopathy. However, the law does not provide any clear definitions of those fetal 'physical or mental defects' ...

Neonatal ethics has focused on 2 questions: is withholding potentially live-saving treatment from neonates ethically justified? and if so, who has the authority to decide? This article details how these questions developed and provides a description of the possible answers. In the first section, we review a selection of seminal ...

Although there is scant evidence to support multidisciplinary meetings in any cancer specialty, they are now regarded as best practice. We believe the oncoplastic multidisciplinary meeting plays a similarly important role, consolidating oncoplastic multidisciplinary working and allowing transparent decision making, standardisation of care and recording of results. This may drive ...

The debate about law and morality is not new but changing social structures and advances in science, medicine and technology have impacted the decisions courts have to make. Within the fast-changing societies of the 21st century, is judicial decision-making cognisant of these advances and how do the judiciary currently reconcile ...

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving institutional healthcare ethics committees. This topic has been the subject of recent articles in JCE. Healthcare ethics committees have also recently been the subject of significant public policy attention. Disturbingly, Bobby Schindler and others have described ethics committees as "death ...

This study is part of a major study about difficulties in communicating ethical problems within and among professional groups working in hemodialysis care. Describing experiences of ethically difficult situations that induce a troubled conscience may raise consciousness about ethical problems and thereby open the way to further reflection.The aim of ...

Making difficult healthcare decisions is often helped by consultation with a bioethics committee. This article reviews the main bioethics principles, when it is appropriate and how to call a bioethics consult, ethical concerns, and members of the consult team. Bioethics resources are included.

How do carers know what is right for their patient? What can they do further to relying on the two pillars of knowledge and ethics? Knowledge foregrounds rational decision-making based on scientific evidence. It allows cost-benefit rationalization and the choice of the best feasible objective. The steady advance of medical ...

Ethics is an essential dimension of perinatal genetics. This article introduces perinatologists to the ethical principles of beneficence and respect for autonomy and uses these ethical principles to articulate the ethical concept of the fetus as a patient. Together these constitute an ethical framework that we apply to risk assessment, ...

In Japanese context, there has been a controversy concerning the withdrawal of life-support, i.e. respiratory system, from ALS patients when, along of the progress of the disease, they have become not able to express themselves at all to people around them, i.e. when they are in so called 'totally locked ...

Purpose. (1) Describe the challenges facing relatives of persons with stroke in accomplishing their daily activities and social roles (participation). (2) Reflect on the role of rehabilitation for relatives and ethical issues that may emerge following the adoption of a family-centred approach. Method. Review of the scientific literature in Medline (1996 to ...

Polygraph interrogations are used by half of all surveyed juvenile sex offender (JSO) treatment programs in the United States. This is a distinctive and controversial practice that is rarely if ever used with other juvenile delinquent populations, and that is rarely used or is banned from JSO treatment programs in ...

Comprehensive health technology assessments (HTAs) include thorough reflections on ethical issues associated with health technologies, their use, and value-based decisions in the assessment process. As methods of information retrieval for effectiveness assessments are not applicable to information retrieval on ethical issues, a specific methodological approach is necessary. In the absence ...

This article provides an overview of the ethical issues associated with penile transplantation, a form of composite tissue allografting. There is only one reported case of human penile transplantation, and, as such, this technique is considered to be experimental. The ethical issues at stake involve both the graft donor and ...

As members of professional organizations such as American Society of Primatologists (ASP) and the International Primatological Society (IPS), primatologists must adhere to a set of nonhuman primate-focused principles outlined in resolutions and policy statements on, for example, the ethical treatment of nonhuman primates. Those of us that work in the ...

Field primatologists face unusual ethical issues. We study animals rather than people and receive research approval from animal care rather than ethics committees. However, animal care evaluation forms are developed from concerns about laboratory animal research and are based on the "Three R's" for humane treatment of captive experimental subjects ...

Examiners are ethically bound to manage personal biases that may infect their expert opinions. Empathy-related issues that lead to bias in forensic assessment of adjudicative competence arise in evaluation interactions with defendants (therapeutic empathy) and from examiners' personal views of issues that these assessments address (empathy-bias). This article first summarizes ...

Issues of responsibility in the world of nanotechnology are becoming explicit with the emergence of a discourse on 'responsible development' of nanoscience and nanotechnologies. Much of this discourse centres on the ambivalences of nanotechnology and of promising technology in general. Actors must find means of dealing with these ambivalences. Actors' ...

This article is part of the EuroSTEC project, which aims at developing tissue engineering-based treatments for structural disorders present at birth. EuroSTEC is positioned at the intersection of three areas with their own ethical issues: (1) regenerative medicine, (2) research with pregnant women and fetuses, and (3) research with neonates. ...

Institutional policies, practices, and norms can impede the delivery of ethical standard-of-care treatment for people with HIV in correctional settings. In this commentary, we focus on the fundamental issues that must be addressed to create an ethical environment in which best medical practices can be implemented when working with correctional ...

Since their introduction as 'no code' in the 1980s and their later formalization to 'do not resuscitate' orders, such directions to withhold potentially life-extending treatments have been accompanied by multiple ethical issues. The arguments for when and why to instigate such orders are explored, including a consideration of the concept ...

The aim of this paper is to focus on the ethical issues raised by the removal of anonymity from sperm donors. The increasing currency of a 'right to genetic truth' is clearly visible in the drive to revise the legislation on donor anonymity in Western and European countries. The ethical ...

August 2006 marked the 10th anniversary of landmark legislation when Israel's parliament passed the unique Patient's Rights Law. This law underscores the importance of medical ethics in Israeli society. During a seminar at the Shaare Zedek School of Nursing, third-year students performed a qualitative research study investigating ethical issues arising ...

Since the advent of clinical human egg donation just over 25 years ago, ethical considerations have been central to its successful application and popular acceptance. Early in its history, "essentialist" arguments questioning the moral validity of the practice altogether were commonplace. More recently, most academic discussion has been focused on ...

The authors review the literature related to patients who obtain a Do-Not-Resuscitate (DNR) order in preparation for a suicide attempt. The authors review the ethical issues involved in making a decision to resuscitate or not in an attempted suicide with a DNR order. The authors address the potential legal consequences ...

Cardiothoracic surgeons are frequently confronted with complex ethical issues. Educational efforts to help surgeons navigate such issues have been undertaken in recent years, but their effectiveness is uncertain. A survey instrument exploring the effects of ethics educational sessions at annual meetings and publications in cardiothoracic surgery journals was sent electronically ...

In order to fulfill ABET requirements, Northern Arizona University's Civil and Environmental engineering programs incorporate professional ethics in several of its engineering courses. This paper discusses an ethics module in a 3rd year engineering design course that focuses on the design process and technical writing. Engineering students early in their ...

Advances in the neurosciences are stirring debate regarding the ethical issues surrounding novel neurosurgical interventions. The application of deep brain stimulation (DBS) for treating refractory psychiatric disease, for instance, has introduced the prospect of altering disorders of mind and behavior and the potential for neuroenhancement. The attitudes of current and ...

Storytelling can be a powerful way to reflect on the ethical issues that emerge in clinical practice. This article uses two stories by speech-language pathologists to explore how notions of person-centered practice may influence speech-language pathology practice. Then these stories are examined in relation to definitions of person-centered practice and ...