-
Some of the core principles of medical ethics are patient determination, doing good for patients, and doing justice. These also are some of the chief attributes of palliative care, experts say.
-
Hospital ethics committees and consultants can improve their own understanding of cultural clashes between the institution and patients/families by first considering the culture inherent in an ethics consult.
-
President Barack Obama has called for an investigation of U.S. human subjects research protections in response to last fall's disclosure that in the 1940s U.S. public health researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan research subjects with syphilis while testing penicillin.
-
The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO) has published a report about end-of-life care, emphasizing the importance of more personal and private discussions about the topic.
-
Hospital ethics committees need to review their hospitals' policies and approach to medical error reporting to determine whether or not the approach is a principled one, an expert says.
-
Take a critical look at the dynamics of the ethics consult meeting in a debriefing, as a way to improve the process, an expert suggests.
-
As a research institution's human subjects research increases, so must an IRB's work. In some cases this means expanding to handling multicenter protocols, which bring may result in new challenges.
-
A recent lawsuit against Brown University in Providence, RI, is an important sign that it's time for research institutions to create formal appeals processes in the event of contested IRB review decisions.
-
The Vice President's Office for Research at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, has developed a formal process for investigators who wish to appeal an IRB determination.
-
IRB application submissions often lack consistency, have omissions and errors, and other problems that IRBs should teach investigators to anticipate and correct before filing their application. Among these mistakes are policy errors, data security concerns, and other procedural problems.
