You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Original research
Are my religious beliefs anyone’s business? A framework for declarations in health and biomedicine
  1. Narcyz Ghinea1,
  2. Miriam Wiersma1,
  3. Ian Kerridge1,2,
  4. Wendy Lipworth1
  1. 1 Faculty of Health and Medicine, School of Public Health, Sydney Health Ethics, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  2. 2 Haematology Department, Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  1. Correspondence to Dr Narcyz Ghinea, Faculty of Health and Medicine, School of Public Health, Sydney Health Ethics, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia; narcyz.ghinea{at}sydney.edu.au

Abstract

Conflicts of interests (COI) are typically divided into those that are financial and those that are not. While there is general agreement that financial COIs have a significant impact on decisions and need to be declared and managed, the status of non-financial COIs continues to be disputed. In a recent BMJ feature article it was proposed that religious beliefs should be routinely declared as an interest. The article generated over 41 responses from the medical community and health researchers, which put forward diverse and opposing views. In this paper, we analyse the discourse to shed further light on the reasons put forward for and against declaring religious beliefs. We argue for a middle path in which only material beliefs should be declared, and then only when there are no extenuating circumstances. To this end, we present a framework to help evaluate the materiality of interests that can be used for both financial and non-financial interests.

  • interests of health personnel/institutions
  • applied and professional ethics
  • codes of/position statements on professional ethics
  • religious ethics

Data availability statement

Data are available in a public, open access repository.

https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2020-106087

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Data availability statement

    Data are available in a public, open access repository.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors NG conceptualised the work, analysed the data and wrote the original draft of the manuscript. MW, IK and WL critically reviewed the work for important intellectual content, helped reconceptualise aspects of the work and contributed to the writing of the final manuscript.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    Other content recommended for you