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A wrong-site, wrong-procedure, and wrong-person universal protocol has been required by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations since July 2004 and supported by multiple national organizations, but adverse events continue.
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More than one-third of American medical students are not required to study medical ethics, according to survey results compiled by the American Medical Student Association (AMSA).
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As IRBs grapple with the issues raised by social-behavioral research, they may also want to consider the concerns of researchers who in a recent study charged that delays in processing proposals and overly intense risk aversion have impeded valuable research.
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There are federal regulations that are supposed to ensure IRBs have appropriate staffing levels, but respondents to the IRB Advisor 2005 Salary Survey could easily make one believe there are very few IRBs that meet that regulation.
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The Environmental Protection Agency has released a draft of its proposed rule limiting the use of intentional dosing research on human subjects.
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The goals of palliative and end-of-life research are unimpeachable discovering methods to ease the suffering of dying patients and their families.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) might have avoided one kind of controversy over the so-called morning-after contraceptive, but it created another by indefinitely delaying approval for the pill known as Plan B to be sold over the counter (OTC).
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When Ron Cranford became a doctor in the 1960s, hospitals didnt have ethics committees. There were no ethics consultants, not even any case law addressing such issues as physician-assisted suicide. Persistent vegetative state hadnt been coined, and Terri Schiavo was just a toddler.
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A catastrophic disaster, either natural or manmade, that not only results in widespread casualties but also wipes out medical resources can force health care providers to abandon typical delivery of care and shift to a kind of battlefield medicine, where the sickest patients may not be treated so that care can be delivered to more.
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The possibility of using embryonic stem cells to treat disease, a strategy known as regenerative medicine, is not yet being explored in clinical trials, but current ethical practices need to be strengthened now in preparation for this possibility, according to an advisory committee at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).