Johnson Pang, Lora Batson, Kathryn Detwiler, Mattea E Miller, Dörte Thorndike, Renee D Boss, Miriam C Shapiro
{"title":"Where do families turn? Ethical dilemmas in the care of chronically critically Ill children.","authors":"Johnson Pang, Lora Batson, Kathryn Detwiler, Mattea E Miller, Dörte Thorndike, Renee D Boss, Miriam C Shapiro","doi":"10.1007/s40592-024-00201-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40592-024-00201-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Advancements in early diagnosis and novel treatments for children with complex and chronic needs have improved their chances of survival. But many survive with complex medical needs and ongoing medical management in the setting of prognostic uncertainty. Their medical care relies more and more on preference-sensitive decisions, requiring medical team and family engagement in ethically challenging situations. Many families are unprepared as they face these ethical challenges and struggle to access relevant ethical resources. In this paper, Timmy's narrative, situated in the context of what is known about ethical challenges in the care of children with chronic critical illness (CCI), serves as a case study of the gap in available ethical resources to guide families in their approach to difficult decision making for children with significant medical complexity and CCI. Our author group, inclusive of parents of children with complex medical needs and medical professionals, identifies domains of ethical challenges facing families of children with CCI and we highlight the development of family/caregiver-oriented ethics resources as an essential expansion of pediatric bioethics.</p>","PeriodicalId":43628,"journal":{"name":"Monash Bioethics Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141555654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Environmental risk and market approval for human pharmaceuticals.","authors":"Davide Fumagalli","doi":"10.1007/s40592-024-00195-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40592-024-00195-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper contributes to the growing discussion about how to mitigate pharmaceutical pollution, which is a threat to human, animal, and environmental health as well as a potential driver of antimicrobial resistance. It identifies market approval of pharmaceuticals as one of the most powerful ways to shape producer behavior and highlights that applying this tool raises ethical issues given that it might impact patients' access to medicines. The paper identifies seven different policy options that progressively give environmental considerations increased priority in the approval process, identifies ethically relevant interests affected by such policies, and makes explicit tensions and necessary tradeoffs between these interests. While arguing that the current European regulation gives insufficient weight to environmental considerations, the paper highlights concerns with the strongest policy options, on the grounds that these may very well endanger patients' access to effective medication.</p>","PeriodicalId":43628,"journal":{"name":"Monash Bioethics Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141493885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Monash Bioethics ReviewPub Date : 2024-06-01Epub Date: 2024-03-09DOI: 10.1007/s40592-024-00189-z
Vinay Prasad, Alyson Haslam
{"title":"COVID-19 vaccines: history of the pandemic's great scientific success and flawed policy implementation.","authors":"Vinay Prasad, Alyson Haslam","doi":"10.1007/s40592-024-00189-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40592-024-00189-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The COVID-19 vaccine has been a miraculous, life-saving advance, offering staggering efficacy in adults, and was developed with astonishing speed. The time from sequencing the virus to authorizing the first COVID-19 vaccine was so brisk even the optimists appear close-minded. Yet, simultaneously, United States' COVID-19 vaccination roll-out and related policies have contained missed opportunities, errors, run counter to evidence-based medicine, and revealed limitations in the judgment of public policymakers. Misplaced utilization, contradictory messaging, and poor deployment in those who would benefit most-the elderly and high-risk-alongside unrealistic messaging, exaggeration, and coercion in those who benefit least-young, healthy Americans-is at the heart. It is important to consider the history of COVID-19 vaccines to identify where we succeeded and where we failed, and the effects that these errors may have more broadly on vaccination hesitancy and routine childhood immunization programs in the decades to come.</p>","PeriodicalId":43628,"journal":{"name":"Monash Bioethics Review","volume":" ","pages":"28-54"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11368972/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140066044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Monash Bioethics ReviewPub Date : 2024-06-01Epub Date: 2024-07-26DOI: 10.1007/s40592-024-00202-5
Anna Lindblad, Niklas Juth, Ingemar Engström, Mikael Sandlund, Niels Lynøe
{"title":"Assisted dying in Swedish healthcare: a qualitative analysis of physicians' reasoning about physician-assisted suicide.","authors":"Anna Lindblad, Niklas Juth, Ingemar Engström, Mikael Sandlund, Niels Lynøe","doi":"10.1007/s40592-024-00202-5","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40592-024-00202-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>To explore Swedish physicians' arguments and values for and against physician-assisted suicide (PAS) extracted from the free-text comments in a postal survey. A random selection of approximately 240 physicians from each of the following specialties: general practice, geriatrics, internal medicine, oncology, surgery and psychiatry. All 123 palliative care physicians in Sweden. A qualitative content analysis of free-text comments in a postal questionnaire commissioned by the Swedish Medical Society in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The total response rate was 59.2%. Of the 933 respondents, 1107 comments were provided. The free-text comments entailed both normative and factual arguments for and against PAS. The analysis resulted in two main categories: (1) \"Safe implementation of PAS is unachievable\" (with subcategories \"Criteria of PAS difficult to fulfil\" and \"PAS puts societal norms and values at risk\") and (2) \"The role of PAS in healthcare\" (with subcategories \"No medical need for PAS\", \"PAS is not a task for physicians\", \"No ethical difference to other end-of-life decisions\" and \"PAS is in the patient's best interest\"). The respondents brought up well-known arguments from academic and public debate on the subject. Comments from physicians against PAS were more often emotionally charged and used devices like dysphemisms and slippery-slope arguments.</p>","PeriodicalId":43628,"journal":{"name":"Monash Bioethics Review","volume":" ","pages":"99-114"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11369034/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141767618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Monash Bioethics ReviewPub Date : 2024-06-01Epub Date: 2024-08-22DOI: 10.1007/s40592-024-00203-4
Joanna Smolenski
{"title":"The foundations of informed consent and bodily self-sovereignty: a positive suggestion.","authors":"Joanna Smolenski","doi":"10.1007/s40592-024-00203-4","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40592-024-00203-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In medical care, the obtaining of informed consent is taken to be required prior to treatment in order to ensure that patients sufficiently understand the potential risks and benefits of a given medical procedure. In this paper, I begin by looking at the history of informed consent and consider how the norms and laws in medicine have evolved away from benevolent paternalism and toward a blanket obligation to obtain informed consent. In so doing, I consider what values might be taken to underpin such a requirement. After dismissing some unsatisfactory answers, I offer a positive view as to the constellation of values I think informed consent ought to be protecting. I call these bodily self-sovereignty, which I take to be a coupling of two groups of values: autonomy and non-domination on the one hand, and self-ownership and personal integrity on the other. Given the connection between autonomy and responsibility, autonomy is both required for the act of consenting, and respected by allowing it. And, because of our special and inescapable relationship to our own bodies, this authorization is particularly important when our bodies are involved. So, I suggest that informed consent protects our self-sovereignty over our own bodies.</p>","PeriodicalId":43628,"journal":{"name":"Monash Bioethics Review","volume":" ","pages":"115-136"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142019026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Monash Bioethics ReviewPub Date : 2024-06-01Epub Date: 2024-07-11DOI: 10.1007/s40592-024-00198-y
Isabella Holmes, Rosalind McDougall
{"title":"The mutuality account of parenthood: a subjective approach to parent-child relationships.","authors":"Isabella Holmes, Rosalind McDougall","doi":"10.1007/s40592-024-00198-y","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40592-024-00198-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Stimulated by development of reproductive technologies, many current bioethical accounts of parenthood focus on defining parenthood at or around birth. They tend to exclude from their scope some parent-child relationships that develop later in a child's life. In reality, a parent-child relationship can emerge or dissolve over time: the parents of person A as an adolescent or adult may be different to her parents when she is a young child. To address this aspect of parenthood, we propose a new 'mutuality account' of parenthood, grounded in the concept of ontological security. We argue that in most cases a parent-child relationship exists if there is mutual ontological security between the parent and child. We suggest that this mutual ontological security is constituted and sustained by shared frameworks of reality and cohesive personal narratives. Our intention is to broaden the conceptual understanding of parenthood, to include parent-child relationships that do not fall neatly into current bioethical accounts, and to argue against the notion that objective physiological, causal, or social ties are necessary to 'make' a parent.</p>","PeriodicalId":43628,"journal":{"name":"Monash Bioethics Review","volume":" ","pages":"87-98"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11368976/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141581086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Monash Bioethics ReviewPub Date : 2024-06-01Epub Date: 2024-07-30DOI: 10.1007/s40592-024-00204-3
David B Resnik
{"title":"Biosafety, biosecurity, and bioethics.","authors":"David B Resnik","doi":"10.1007/s40592-024-00204-3","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40592-024-00204-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of biosafety in the biomedical sciences. While it is often assumed that biosafety is a purely technical matter that has little to do with philosophy or the humanities, biosafety raises important ethical issues that have not been adequately examined in the scientific or bioethics literature. This article reviews some pivotal events in the history of biosafety and biosecurity and explores three different biosafety topics that generate significant ethical concerns, i.e., risk assessment, risk management, and risk distribution. The article also discusses the role of democratic governance in the oversight of biosafety and offers some suggestions for incorporating bioethics into biosafety practice, education, and policy.</p>","PeriodicalId":43628,"journal":{"name":"Monash Bioethics Review","volume":" ","pages":"137-167"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11368980/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141793695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Monash Bioethics ReviewPub Date : 2024-06-01Epub Date: 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1007/s40592-023-00186-8
Ben Davies, Joshua Parker
{"title":"Deference or critical engagement: how should healthcare practitioners use clinical ethics guidance?","authors":"Ben Davies, Joshua Parker","doi":"10.1007/s40592-023-00186-8","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40592-023-00186-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Healthcare practitioners have access to a range of ethical guidance. However, the normative role of this guidance in ethical decision-making is underexplored. This paper considers two ways that healthcare practitioners could approach ethics guidance. We first outline the idea of deference to ethics guidance, showing how an attitude of deference raises three key problems: moral value; moral understanding; and moral error. Drawing on philosophical literature, we then advocate an alternative framing of ethics guidance as a form of moral testimony by colleagues and suggest that a more promising attitude to ethics guidance is to approach it in the spirit of 'critical engagement' rather than deference.</p>","PeriodicalId":43628,"journal":{"name":"Monash Bioethics Review","volume":" ","pages":"1-15"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11369004/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139991456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Monash Bioethics ReviewPub Date : 2024-06-01Epub Date: 2024-07-13DOI: 10.1007/s40592-024-00199-x
Wayne X Shandera
{"title":"COVID-19 ethics: unique aspects and a review as of early 2024.","authors":"Wayne X Shandera","doi":"10.1007/s40592-024-00199-x","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40592-024-00199-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>COVID-19 presents a variety of ethical challenges in a set of arenas, arenas not always considered in past pandemics. These challenges include issues related to autonomy, distributive ethics, and the establishment of policies of equity and justice. Methods are a literature review based on regular editing of an online textbook during the COVID-19 outbreak and a literature review using key ethical terms. Patients are confronted with new issues related to autonomy. Providers need to expand their concepts of ethical issues to include decisions based on proportionality and public health ethics. The public health sector needs to assess the beneficence of alternative modes of disease control. The research community needs to redefine the concept of informed consent in emergent conditions. All elements of the medical spectrum-physicians, scientists, and the community-at-large including the pharmaceutical industry-need to consider the multifaceted methods for preventing future pandemics. This will require giving particular emphasis to public health funding and ending the documented discrimination that exists in the provision of proven therapies. The developing world is especially at risk for most of the ethical issues, especially those related to equity and justice. The ethical issues associated with the COVID-19 outbreak are not unique but provide a diverse set of issues that apply to patients, providers, social groups, and investigators. The further study of such issues can help with preventing future outbreaks.</p>","PeriodicalId":43628,"journal":{"name":"Monash Bioethics Review","volume":" ","pages":"55-86"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11368997/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141604337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Monash Bioethics ReviewPub Date : 2024-06-01Epub Date: 2024-03-02DOI: 10.1007/s40592-024-00188-0
Hnin Si Oo, Pascal Borry
{"title":"Contact investigation in multidrug-resistant tuberculosis: ethical challenges.","authors":"Hnin Si Oo, Pascal Borry","doi":"10.1007/s40592-024-00188-0","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40592-024-00188-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Contact investigation is an evidence-based intervention of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) to protect public health by interrupting the chain of transmission. In pursuit of contact investigation, patients' MDR-TB status has to be disclosed to third parties (to the minimum necessary) for tracing the contacts. Nevertheless, disclosure to third parties often unintentionally leads the MDR-TB patients suffered from social discrimination and stigma. For this reason, patients are less inclined to reveal their MDR-TB status and becomes a significant issue in contact investigation. This issue certainly turns into a negative impact on the public interest. Tension between keeping MDR-TB status confidential and safeguarding public health arises in relation to this issue. Regarding MDR-TB management, patient compliance with treatment and contact investigation are equally important. Patients might fail to comply with anti-TB therapy and be reluctant to seek healthcare due to disclosure concerns. In order to have treatment adherence, MDRTB patients should not live through social discrimination and stigma arising from disclosure and TB team has a duty to support them as a mean of reciprocity. However, implementation of contact investigation as a public health policy can still be challenging even with promising reciprocal support to the patients because MDR-TB patients are living in different contexts and situations. There can be no straight forward settlement but an appropriate justification for each distinct context is needed to strike a balance between individual confidentiality and public interest.</p>","PeriodicalId":43628,"journal":{"name":"Monash Bioethics Review","volume":" ","pages":"16-27"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140013404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}