Delivering high-quality healthcare in today’s multicultural society requires that healthcare professionals are skilled in addressing cultural and religious differences in patient care. Despite this need, medical education often falls short in providing adequate cultural competence training, especially regarding care for Muslim patients. To address this gap, we developed an innovative educational program aimed at enhancing medical students’ intercultural skills, with a focus on caring for Muslim
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Written by Orhan Ersin Silik
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Artificial intelligence (AI), including large language models (LLMs), holds significant promise for oncology, yet the extent of medical oncologists’ knowledge, attitudes, and ethical concerns regarding AI is not well understood. This issue is especially pertinent in Türkiye, home to roughly 1,340 practicing oncologists. We conducted an online, cross-sectional survey through the Turkish Society of Medical Oncology from October 16 to November 27, 2024. The questionnaire collected information on de
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Providing care for patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) often generates significant moral distress for healthcare professionals. Central to this distress is the ethical tension between enforcing treatment to prevent severe outcomes, such as premature death, and honoring patients’ refusals of care. Despite its relevance, empirical research on this moral conflict remains limited. We examined all 19 documented ethics consultations (ECs) related to AN from a single clinical ethics support service in
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Written by Afreen Jannath
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Throughout history, epidemics have often been accompanied by stigma, prejudice, and xenophobic attitudes. This scoping review sought to examine and map the existing literature on ethical considerations related to monkeypox (mpox) and to identify gaps in research regarding stigma associated with the disease. A thorough search was conducted across multiple databases, including PubMed Central, PubMed Medline, Scopus, Web of Science, Ovid, and Google Scholar, covering the period from May 6, 2022, to
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Written by Delyse Leadbeatter
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Around the world, the use of genetic test results in insurance underwriting has raised serious concerns, leading many countries to restrict or ban the practice. In contrast, Australian life insurers are legally permitted to consider genetic information, under rules set by the industry itself through the Financial Services Council (FSC). A 2018 Parliamentary Inquiry recommended prohibiting this practice, and in 2019 the FSC responded with a self-imposed moratorium. Because there is no government
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Written by Anna S. Nazzal
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Understanding patient rights is essential for promoting ethical medical practice and upholding human rights in healthcare. Previous research indicates that patients’ awareness of their rights varies widely. This study aimed to evaluate the level of awareness of patient rights among individuals in Palestine and to examine healthcare professionals’ adherence to these rights. A cross-sectional survey was carried out from November 2023 to January 2024 across cities in the Northern West Bank. Data we
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Written by Sarah Tutticci
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Globally, healthcare is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, intensifying the ongoing climate emergency. While strategies to cut emissions are being introduced across health systems, the degree to which environmental sustainability should influence clinical decision-making at the level of individual practitioners remains uncertain. To investigate this question, we carried out a systematic review of published arguments both supporting and opposing the integration of environmental considera
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Written by Triantafillos Smith
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
This article critically examines the ethical dilemmas that arise when physicians publicly comment on high-profile medical cases, illustrated through recent cancer diagnoses in the British royal family. It explores the competing demands of societal interest, individual privacy, and professional ethical obligations, emphasizing the risks posed by speculative or conjectural statements. The discussion also highlights how medical professionals can contribute responsibly to public understanding of hea
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Written by Vanessa Machado
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
People living with severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI) constitute a small yet highly vulnerable group within mental health care. Their care raises complex ethical challenges due to factors such as the intensity of their conditions, limited social support, communication difficulties, impaired decision-making, and, occasionally, disruptive behaviors. Despite these challenges, research on ethical issues in this population remains limited. This study explores the ethical considerations invol
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Compulsory treatments legally mandate care for individuals—typically those with mental disorders—who refuse therapeutic interventions and pose a danger to themselves or others. Compulsory outpatient treatment (COT), also called a community treatment order, extends this involuntary care from hospital settings into the community. Although implemented in over 75 jurisdictions globally, COT remains one of the most debated practices in psychiatry and raises significant ethical concerns. Despite exten
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This study examines the functioning of a Bioethics Unit (BU) five years after its launch (2016–2020), combining quantitative metrics with qualitative insights. The BU operates as a dedicated research center, investigating ethical challenges in clinical practice, offering ethics consultations, and delivering training programs for health care professionals (HPs). We employed a sequential mixed-methods design, starting with quantitative analysis followed by qualitative exploration to contextualize
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Written by Aung Kyaw Moe
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Ethics consultations provide a structured avenue for sharing responsibility in complex decision-making scenarios in prenatal medicine, particularly when moral instincts alone cannot yield a clear course of action. Nevertheless, it remains uncertain whether the conventional frameworks for ethics consultation are fully applicable to the uniquely sensitive context of pregnancy. This study examines the distinctive types of disagreements, ethical conflicts, and value uncertainties that arise in prena
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Research institutions in North East (NE) India provide very little publicly available information about their institutional ethics committees (IECs) or the standard operating procedures (SOPs) that guide them. To address this gap, a review was carried out across fourteen biomedical and health research institutes in the region. Only twelve of these had formally created IECs. These committees drew members from varied professional backgrounds and sectors, yet only eight institutions demonstrated ag
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Written by Mohammad Rizwan
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Assessing decision-making competence in transgender and gender-diverse adolescents is a complex task, as care in this area involves supporting a developing gender identity and making decisions about treatments that often lack international agreement. Even when competence assessments are performed, moral dilemmas can arise during the decision-making process. Traditional clinical ethics support approaches, such as moral case deliberation, may be insufficient because they do not provide thematic gu
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Written by Nurlina Hamzah
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
In recent decades, the role of ethics in health research has gained global recognition. However, institutional review boards (IRBs) are sometimes seen as obstacles rather than enablers of research. This study focuses on the Philippines, a country where the dynamics of health research ethics and IRBs remain underexplored, offering insights applicable to other low- and middle-income settings. Between July and October 2020, semi-structured interviews were conducted with Filipino health researchers
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Clinical ethics support (CES) instruments are widely regarded as valuable tools; however, users frequently encounter barriers to their routine use. Involving end users and other stakeholders in the development of CES instruments may help address these challenges. This study outlines the creation of CURA, a user-friendly, four-step ethics support tool designed for nurses and nurse assistants in palliative care. A participatory development approach was employed, involving collaboration with stakeh
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Written by Azimjon Karimov
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Although psychedelics were banned from medical research for about fifty years, recent early-phase studies indicate they may offer unique therapeutic benefits for various mental health and substance use disorders. When effective, psychedelic experiences often involve phenomena not typically observed in other medical or psychiatric interventions, such as a diminished sense of self-importance, insights that are difficult to articulate, feelings of connection and unity with others, and encounters wi
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Pediatricians working in low-resource environments encounter ethical problems that differ from those seen in wealthier healthcare systems. Only a small number of studies from developing nations have examined how pediatricians understand, perceive, and navigate the ethical challenges inherent to such settings. To contribute to this limited body of evidence, we investigated the clinical ethical knowledge, attitude, and experience of physicians employed in the Department of Pediatrics and Child Hea
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Understanding and applying medical ethics is increasingly recognized as essential in medical education. This research comprised two studies: the first evaluated clinicians’ knowledge, attitudes, and self-reported practices regarding medical ethics at Patan Academy of Health Sciences, a tertiary teaching hospital in Nepal, while the second compared these outcomes between doctors who had formal medical ethics training during their undergraduate studies and those who had not. Two cross-sectional su
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As Canadian investigators engaged in a qualitative project involving adults with and without disabilities in Uganda, we secured approval from four research ethics boards—two based in Canada and two located in Uganda. Ethical oversight in Canada is guided by the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS2), while Ugandan researchers adhere to the National Guidelines for Research Involving Humans as Research Participants (NGRU). Despite obtaining authorizatio
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Written by Rina Shrestha
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Patient involvement in clinical ethics support services (CESS) is increasingly recognized as important, yet global practices vary widely and comprehensive theoretical or empirical studies are scarce. Limited evidence from Europe suggests that patient participation in CESS (hereafter referred to as PP) differs by region and type of service, ranging from being entirely absent to patients acting as full dialogue partners. In contrast, North America appears to have more uniform adoption of PP. Altho
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Written by Pham Quang Huy
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
As hospitals have evolved and become more intricate, the ethical dilemmas they face have also increased in complexity. To address this, many institutions have implemented health care ethics programs (HCEPs) that extend beyond simple ethics consultation services, yet comprehensive research on these programs remains limited. A national, cross-sectional survey targeting a stratified sample of 600 U.S. hospitals was conducted to assess the presence, functions, activities, staffing, workload, funding
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Written by Matthias Zimmer
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Effective teamwork plays a crucial role in emergency medical services in enhancing patient safety. However, the possible impact of staff gender on communication patterns, patient safety outcomes, and overall team performance has rarely been considered. This study seeks to investigate these largely neglected aspects. An anonymous descriptive survey was conducted via an online questionnaire distributed to emergency physicians and paramedics. Respondents were asked to share their views on teamwork,
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Written by Benjamín Herreros
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Medical practitioners commonly deal with moral tensions and difficult choices in patient care, prompting increased attention to the concept of conscientious objection (CO). Spain’s health system currently offers no formal guidance on what constitutes valid reasons for CO, how it should be properly exercised, or how best to assist professionals who choose to invoke it. A well-defined procedural framework is therefore necessary. This framework must ensure responsible use of CO by clinicians while
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Written by Rachel C Greer
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Securing genuine informed consent can be difficult, especially where literacy levels are low, yet it remains a crucial safeguard for individuals participating in global health studies. This paper examines the specific barriers to obtaining meaningful consent when recruiting research participants from mainly hill-tribe communities in northern Thailand. We examined the obstacles and possible ways forward to obtaining meaningful consent by conducting a qualitative investigation among a predominantl
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Written by Candice Cornelis
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Massively parallel sequencing methods, including whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), can uncover unsolicited findings (UFs) that are unrelated to the original diagnostic goal. These approaches are commonly applied in the diagnostic evaluation of children with developmental delay (DD). However, existing policy guidelines on informed consent and the return of UFs are not adequately prepared to handle the unique moral issues that can emerge in such pediatric cases. In th
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Written by Roya Malekzadeh
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous nations focused on developing and delivering reliable vaccines to manage the outbreak and safeguard community well-being. The deployment of immunization efforts has raised several moral challenges that require careful identification and resolution. For this reason, the current investigation aimed to explore the ethical aspects of COVID-19 immunization as viewed by frontline healthcare personnel. This qualitative investigation took place
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Written by Katharina Tilch
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
With the emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), scientists worldwide encountered substantial obstacles. The German National Pandemic Cohort Network (NAPKON) was established in the fall of 2020 to make optimal use of available resources and coordinate research initiatives to address the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We evaluated the initial setup phase of NAPKON as a representative case for multicenter research efforts in Germany, with particula
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Written by Martina E. Gustavsson
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Healthcare professionals (HCWs) often experience moral stress and distress when faced with ethical dilemmas in which aligning their actions with their core moral beliefs becomes difficult. During major crises like disasters or pandemics, these ethically complex moments become far more common, mainly due to the growing mismatch between what patients need and the limited resources available. That said, the concepts of moral stress and moral distress are applied inconsistently across the literature
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Written by Hamideh Hakimi
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Moral courage represents a vital quality that enables nurses to effectively manage ethical challenges, fulfill their professional responsibilities toward patients, and consistently uphold core ethical standards. This trait can be shaped by a range of influences, including personal attributes, professional elements, organizational conditions, and leadership dynamics. The current study sought to identify the key predictors of moral courage in nurses practicing in hospital settings. In 2018, a cros
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Written by Elleke Landeweer
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
In 2020, amid the COVID-19 outbreak, national governments introduced strict measures—including visitor bans, prohibitions on group activities, and quarantine protocols—to shield nursing home residents from infection. With safety as the overriding priority, residents and their close relatives were compelled to accept these limitations. Their viewpoints matter greatly because the policies profoundly affected their lives, yet they were left out of the decision-making process. This study explores th
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Written by Tsegaye Melaku
Published in Vol 5 , 2025
Ethical thinking and awareness are crucial in all areas of public health, but they are even more significant in the delicate, multifaceted field of public health emergency preparedness. This study investigated the ethical issues and moral dilemmas experienced by frontline health workers during the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic in Ethiopia. A nationwide survey was conducted among frontline health workers at nineteen public hospitals. Participants were asked to fill out a self-adminis
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