Medical Ethics
RSSArticles
-
When Hospitals Refuse to See Medicaid Patients
Serving the best interests of patients while remaining financially solvent is a high-wire act. Ethicists can help clarify a hospital’s obligations to Medicaid patients, including policies relating to admission criteria, such as for patients with inadequate funding. These policies also can clear up confusion over ethical and legal obligations to Medicaid patients who present with emergencies.
-
Ethical Concerns When Calling Security Is Top Tactic to Handle Agitated Patients
Police officers are not mental healthcare professionals, but often are the ones called to help a person in crisis, even if that person is in the hospital at the time. Instead, police should be teamed with a mental health professional to help de-escalate volatile situations.
-
Ethical Framework for Prioritizing Healthcare Workers to Receive Vaccine
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisors cited ethical reasons for selecting healthcare workers as first to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
-
CDC: Healthcare Workers First in Line for COVID-19 Vaccine
Healthcare workers have been designated as the highest priority group to receive the first safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine cleared for use in the United States, according to recent discussions and materials reviewed in a non-voting meeting of top immunization advisors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
-
Lessons Learned — or Not — from Hydroxychloroquine Mishap
The research community’s decades of work to build public trust in IRB oversight and the clinical trial process has reached one of its greatest challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Misinformation spread through social media and some media outlets, as well as contradictory instructions and information from political and public health officials, have helped create distrust. Through the spring of 2020, misinformation about hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 therapeutic proliferated after President Trump spoke about it as a cure.
-
Minority Recruitment for COVID-19 Trials Is Low While Disease Burden Is High
More than 350,000 people said they were interested in volunteering for a COVID-19 vaccine trial in the United States, and only 10% of those who signed up are Black and Hispanic. Actual trial enrollment among two companies with large COVID-19 vaccine trials in the U.S. includes only one in five volunteers who are Black and Hispanic.
-
COVID-19 Misinformation Affects Everyone in Research Community
Clinical trial recruitment for COVID-19 studies faces a new challenge: Rampant misinformation. Since COVID-19 was declared a national emergency and pandemic, fake news, false cures, ill-informed posts, and conspiracy theories have dominated the social media space. One of the challenges from an IRB perspective involves informed consent and public trust in the shadows of the misinformation world.
-
Vaccine Trials Should Follow the Four Ethical Principles
All human research, including COVID-19 vaccine trials, should be guided by the four ethical principles of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. When researchers, data safety monitoring boards, or the Food and Drug Administration decide to stop a clinical trial or expedite approval or use of an investigational product, these principles still apply.
-
A COVID-19 Vaccine at ‘Warp Speed’ Raises Myriad Ethical Questions
The United States is at a challenging and possibly dangerous crossroad as the desire for speedy development of a COVID-19 vaccine might be pushing political concerns ahead of safety, efficacy, and the regulatory process, bioethicists and researchers say.
-
Sepsis Outcomes Improve, But Not at Minority-Serving Hospitals
ICU deaths declined 2% steadily annually at non-minority hospitals, according to a recent report. This was not true of minority-serving hospitals. Those hospitals also reported longer lengths of stay and more critical illness than non-minority hospitals.