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Despite the dominance of technology and medical discourse in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), many parents facing the end of their child's life view the experience as a spiritual journey as well as a medical one. Those families rely on religious faith or spiritual support as they struggle to find meaning in their children's situation and make end-of-life decisions for them.
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If your after-hours answering service is asking patients calling in to decide whether their complaint is an emergency, are you asking for trouble? Possibly, says a Minnesota researcher who evaluated 2,835 after-hours calls to a family medicine residency office in Denver.
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The number of academic medical centers that are banning free drug samples, free lunches, and other gifts from pharmaceutical company representatives remains small, but continues to grow.
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Are research and quality improvement (QI) mutually exclusive, or natural partners? When QI crosses over into research, what ethical issues can arise?
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Commercial tissue repositories looking for sources of human tissue, and hospitals that discard tissue from surgeries daily, could appear to be a match made in heaven.
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When an IRB is confronted with reviewing an unfamiliar commercial collaboration to collect human tissue, it doesn't have to work in a vacuum.
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As studies become geared toward narrow research questions, targeting specific groups, IRB members will have an even more challenging time resolving ethical dilemmas and weighing risks and benefits.
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Media attention on research conflicts of interest has made it imperative that IRBs be aware of a wider variety of potential conflicts of interest than what they may have considered in the past, experts say.
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It's an accepted truism among many in biomedical research: Blacks won't participate at the same rates as other ethnic groups, because of fear of being exploited, thanks to the legacy of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
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IRB members and researchers are beginning to hear more about a new model for weighing risks and benefits in human subjects research. Called component analysis, it requires IRBs to weigh individual procedure risks and benefits against themselves.
