Journal of medical ethics
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Journal of medical ethics · Oct 2005
Authorship ignorance: views of researchers in French clinical settings.
To assess the knowledge and behaviour of researchers regarding criteria for authorship, and the practices of ghost and gift authorship. ⋯ The ICMJE criteria were ignored by clinicians at a university hospital. Ghost and gift authorship were frequent among them. There is a need for French guidelines for authorship to be prepared and implemented.
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Journal of medical ethics · Oct 2005
Practical virtue ethics: healthcare whistleblowing and portable digital technology.
Medical school curricula and postgraduate education programmes expend considerable resources teaching medical ethics. Simultaneously, whistleblowers' agitation continues, at great personal cost, to prompt major intrainstitutional and public inquiries that reveal problems with the application of medical ethics at particular clinical "coalfaces". Virtue ethics, emphasising techniques promoting an agent's character and instructing their conscience, has become a significant mode of discourse in modern medical ethics. ⋯ Finally, it is proposed that a virtue based ethos of medical professionalism, exhibiting transparency and sincerity with regard to achieving uniform quality and safety of health care, may be facilitated by introducing a technological imperative using portable computing devices. Their use by trainees, focused on ethical competence, provides the practical face of virtue ethics in medical education and practice. Indeed, it assists in transforming the professional conscience of whistleblowing into a practical, virtue based culture of self reporting and personal development.
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Journal of medical ethics · Sep 2005
Paying research participants: a study of current practices in Australia.
To examine current research payment practices and to inform development of clearer guidelines for researchers and ethics committees. ⋯ Research subject payment practices vary in Australia. Researchers who do provide payments to research participants generally do so without written policy and procedures. Ethics committees have an important role in developing guidelines in this area. Specific guidelines are needed considering existing local policies and procedures; payment models and their application in diverse settings; case study examples of types and levels of reimbursement; applied definitions of incentive and inducement; and the rationale for diverse payment practices in different settings.
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Journal of medical ethics · Aug 2005
Attitudes towards and barriers to writing advance directives amongst cancer patients, healthy controls, and medical staff.
After years of public discussion too little is still known about willingness to accept the idea of writing an advance directive among various groups of people in EU countries. We investigated knowledge about and willingness to accept such a directive in cancer patients, healthy controls, physicians, and nursing staff in Germany. ⋯ Only a minority of the participants had written an advance directive and knew about the possibility of authorizing a health care proxy. Deteriorating health was associated with increasing willingness to make a directive. Despite a majority belief that advance directives may influence treatment at the end of life, other factors limit their employment, such as fear of abuse.
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Journal of medical ethics · Jul 2005
ReviewDoes it matter that organ donors are not dead? Ethical and policy implications.
The "standard position" on organ donation is that the donor must be dead in order for vital organs to be removed, a position with which we agree. Recently, Robert Truog and Walter Robinson have argued that (1) brain death is not death, and (2) even though "brain dead" patients are not dead, it is morally acceptable to remove vital organs from those patients. We accept and defend their claim that brain death is not death, and we argue against both the US "whole brain" criterion and the UK "brain stem" criterion. ⋯ We dispute their claim that the removal of vital organs is morally equivalent to "letting nature take its course", arguing that, unlike "allowing to die", it is the removal of vital organs that kills the patient, not his or her disease or injury. Then, we argue that removing vital organs from living patients is immoral and contrary to the nature of medical practice. Finally, we offer practical suggestions for changing public policy on organ transplantation.