Correspondence to:
Sheila A M McLean
Institute of Law and Ethics in Medicine, University of Glasgow, The Stair Building, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK; s.a.m.mclean@law.gla.ac.uk
Original version received 27 April 2007
Revised version received
27 April 2007
Accepted for publication
27 April 2007
As support for clinical ethics committees in the UK grows, care must be taken to define their function, membership and method of working and the status of their decisions.
Abbreviations: CEC, clinical ethics committee
Keywords:
clinical ethics committees
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The modern practice of medicine raises a plethora of complex issues—medical, ethical and legal. Doctors and other healthcare professionals increasingly must try to resolve these and may sometimes have to do so in the face of contrary opinion expressed by patients and/or their surrogates. While clearly qualified in the medical arena, and although there is now more ethics teaching in the medical curriculum, healthcare professionals are seldom qualified to adjudicate on ethical or legal matters, or even, perhaps, to recognise them when they arise. Yet, as Doyal says, "clinical life must go on and moral and legal indeterminacy within medicine cries out for practical resolution."1 Meanwhile, the expectations of patients and their families—and, indeed, of wider society—are that decisions about patient care, resources and therapeutic regimes should be soundly based on appropriate ethicolegal, as well as scientific, principle.
Recognition of these additional . . . [Full text of this article]
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