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Journal of Medical Ethics is an official journal of the Institute of Medical Ethics and a Plan S compliant Transformative Journal. JME features articles on ethical aspects of health care relevant to health care professionals, members of clinical ethics committees, medical ethics professionals, researchers and bioscientists, policy makers and ...
Good reasons to vaccinate: mandatory or payment for risk?
Mandatory vaccination, including for COVID-19, can be ethically justified if the threat to public health is grave, the confidence in safety and effectiveness is high, the expected utility of mandatory vaccination is greater than the alternatives, and the penalties or costs for non-compliance are proportionate. I describe an algorithm for justified mandatory vaccination.
Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 5th edn.
Beauchamp T L, Childress J F. Oxford University Press, 2001, £19.95, pp 454. ISBN 0-19-514332-9. The Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Beauchamp and Childress is a classic in the field of medical ethics. The first edition was published in 1979 and “unleashed” the four principles of respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice on the newly emerging field.
May 21, 2021 · A4R is a practical decision- making framework for priority setting that has been used in various areas of healthcare to support fair resource allocation. It is a process- based rather than an outcomes- based framework, focusing on how decisions ought to be made rather than on the outcomes of those deci-sions.
Defending the four principles approach as a good basis for good …
This paper argues that the four prima facie principles—beneficence, non-maleficence, respect for autonomy and justice—afford a good and widely acceptable basis for ‘doing good medical ethics’. It confronts objections that the approach is simplistic, incompatible with a virtue-based approach to medicine, that it requires respect for autonomy always to have priority when the principles ...
An autonomy-based approach to assisted suicide
In several jurisdictions, irremediable suffering from a medical condition is a legal requirement for access to assisted dying. According to the expressivist objection, allowing assisted dying for a specific group of persons, such as those with irremediable medical conditions, expresses the judgment that their lives are not worth living. While the …
Why is informed consent important? | Journal of Medical Ethics
Decision-making is a prominent theme in this edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics . Our feature article examines the relationship between trust and informed consent. Informed consent is, of course, central to the decision-making process in medicine. In addition, several articles consider decision-making in medicine from a variety of angles. …
Reconsidering fetal pain - Journal of Medical Ethics
Introduction. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan wrote an article in Human Life Review that (to our knowledge) first directly raised the possibility that the fetus can “respond to pain”.1 Subsequently, the possibility of fetal pain was raised in a review in the New England Journal of Medicine,2 an accompanying editorial,3 and a clinical trial examining the use of analgesia and anaesthesia ...
Healthcare scandals in the NHS: crime and punishment
The Francis Report into failures of care at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Hospital documented a series of ‘shocking’ systematic failings in healthcare that left patients routinely neglected, humiliated and in pain as the Trust focused on cutting costs and hitting government targets. At present, the criminal law in England plays a limited role in calling healthcare professionals to ...
Death with dignity - Journal of Medical Ethics
CRITICISMS OF “DEATH WITH DIGNITY”. The application of the phrase “death with dignity” in health care has been attacked. Ramsey suggests that death is an indignity, an affront to life, and that the phrase is, therefore, an oxymoron. 3 His argument, however, makes two errors. The first is that it confuses the different senses of “death”.