Kevin Boyd

The Research Excellence Framework of the Higher Education Funding Council for England is taking place in 2013, its three key elements being outputs, impact, and “quality of the research environment”. Impact will be assessed using case studies that “may include any social, economic or cultural impact or benefit beyond academia that has taken place during the assessment period.”1 Medical ethics in the UK still does not have its own cognate assessment panel—for example, bioethics or applied ethics—unlike in, for example, Australia. Several researchers in medical ethics have reported to the Institute of Medical Ethics that during the internal preliminary stage of the Research Excellence Framework several medical schools have decided to include only research that entails empirical data gathering. Thus, conceptual papers and ethical analysis will be excluded. The arbitrary exclusion of reasoned discussion of medical ethics issues as a proper subject for medical research unless it is based on empirical data gathering is conceptually mistaken. “Empirical ethics” is, of course, a legitimate component of medical ethics research, but to act as though it is the only legitimate component suggests, at best, a partial understanding of the nature of ethics in general and medical ethics in particular. It also mistakenly places medicine firmly on only one side of the science/humanities “two cultures” divide instead of in its rightful place bridging the divide. Given the emphasis by the General Medical Council on medical ethics in properly preparing “tomorrow’s doctors,” we urge medical schools to find a way of using the upcoming Research Excellence Framework to highlight the expertise residing in their ethicist colleagues. We are confident that appropriate assessment will reveal work of high quality that can be shown to have social and cultural impact and benefit beyond academia, as required by the framework.

An Institute of Medical Ethics working party supports the view that explicit permission should normally be sought in the case of testing for HIV antibody. It discusses this in relation to anonymised HIV testing for epidemiological purposes, concluding that this is to be welcomed, given certain safeguards. It next argues that pregnant women may have a greater and more immediate need than others to know their HIV status. It concludes that this need does not justify testing them without their permission, but can be met by voluntary diagnostic testing on an 'opting-out' basis, supported by adequate briefing

An Institute of Medical Ethics working party argues that an ethically desirable relationship of mutual empowerment between patient and clinician is more likely to be achieved if patients understand the ground rules of medical confidentiality. It identifies and illustrates ambiguities in the General Medical Council's guidance on AIDS and confidentiality, and relates this to the practice of different doctors and specialties. Matters might be clarified, it suggests, by identifying moral factors which tend to recur in medical decisions about maintaining or breaching confidentiality. The working party argues that two such factors are particularly important: the patient's need to exercise informed choice and the doctor's primary responsibility to his or her own patients

Men have been talking of death from time immemorial - sometimes sublimely in prose and poetry, in painting and sculpture and in music - till silence seemed to fall in the recent past. Now men are again talking about death - interminably but colloquially. They talk on television, on the radio, in books and in pamphlets. Dr Kenneth Boyd therefore finds it entirely timely to offer this historical sketch of attitudes to death. The earlier part of his paper covers fairly familiar ground but his final and longest section on the work of a social historian, Philippe Ariès, may be new to many. Ariès is reinterpreting the long history of attitudes to death in a form which may well interest those who today are concerned with helping modern man to accept his own death - death which still, for most people, is the death of another, not of oneself

Knowledge of the ethical and legal basis of medicine is as essential to clinical practice as an understanding of basic medical sciences. In the UK, the General Medical Council requires that medical graduates behave according to ethical and legal principles and must know about and comply with the GMC’s ethical guidance and standards. We suggest that these standards can only be achieved when the teaching and learning of medical ethics, law and professionalism are fundamental to, and thoroughly integrated both vertically and horizontally throughout, the curricula of all medical schools as a shared obligation of all teachers. The GMC also requires that each medical school provides adequate teaching time and resources to achieve the above. We reiterate that the adequate provision and coordination of teaching and learning of ethics and law requires at least one full-time senior academic in ethics and law with relevant professional and academic expertise. In this paper we set out an updated indicative core content of learning for medical ethics and law in UK medical schools and describe its origins and the consultative process by which it was achieved.

Objective: To determine whether the marks in the third year Objective Structured Clinical Examination were affected by the collusion reported by the students themselves on an electronic discussion board.Design: A review of the student discussion, examiners’ feedback and a comparison of the marks obtained on the 2 days of the OSCE.Participants: 255 third year medical students.Setting: An OSCE consisting of 15 stations, administered on three sites over 2 days at a UK medical school.Results: 40 students contributed to the discussion on the electronic discussion board. The main points raised were perceived inequity between students who did, or did not, have prior knowledge of the station content, and the lack of honesty and professionalism of their peers. Most contributors claimed to have received, or knew of others receiving, prior knowledge, but none confessed to passing on information. No significant difference was observed in the overall mark for the OSCE on day 1 ) and day 2 ). On day 2, marks were considerably greater for four stations and markedly lower for three stations. It was not obvious why collusion should affect these station marks. A clear indication of the effects of collusion could only be obtained from a single subsection of an individual station where 82 students on day 2 incorrectly gave the diagnosis from day 1.Conclusion: Marks do not provide a sound inference of student collusion in an OSCE and may mask the aspects of professional development of students

Medical ethics, principles, persons, and perspectives is discussed under three headings: History, Theory, and Practice. Under Theory, the author will say something about some different approaches to the study and discussion of ethical issues in medicine—especially those based on principles, persons, or perspectives. Under Practice, the author will discuss how one perspectives based approach, hermeneutics, might help in relation first to everyday ethical issues and then to public controversies. In that context some possible advantages of moving from controversy to conversation will be explored; and that will then be illustrated with reference to a current controversy about the use of human embryos in stem cell therapy research. The paper begins with history, and it begins in the author’s home city of Edinburgh

AIDSThe sudden appearance of a truly new disease is a wake-up call. A new global pandemic of an infectious agent, transmitted through sexual contact and blood, affecting alienated and/or deprived people and communities, infectious throughout, that causes a slowly progressive breakdown of defence against other infectious diseases, as well as causing dementia in some, and leads to a premature death, occurring in an era of extensive travel and rapid communication, is a veritable tocsin. These crude ingredients of AIDS as a medical and social phenomenon, blended with the poignant personal histories revealed to clinical professionals, spiced — as if this were necessary — by the fear, the prejudice, the wild theorising and the voyeurism, have presented a substantial challenge to practical medical ethics.Familiar ethical debates have been reopened with new perspective and insight, others have been examined thoroughly for the first time. Building on the major developments in medical ethics over recent decades, AIDS has provided an opportunity, indeed a necessity, for its maturation. It continues to present new issues for debate, while those that were present from the outset continue to perplex us, as this issue of the journal should show. In teaching, AIDS offers a plethora of examples to illustrate most of the central tenets and tensions of medical ethics. As an exemplar, it has provided preparation and precedent for addressing some of the issues emerging from new challenges, such as screening for susceptibility to genetic disease.AJPBereavementThe word comes from the same germanic root as “to be robbed excessively”. Bereavement is an intensely personal and disorienting experience, to which people can react with denial, anger, guilt or depression, sometimes prolonged. In Western countries nowadays it is most commonly experienced in mid-life through the death of a parent, or in old age through that of a …

Background: The Declaration of Helsinki, the World Medical Association’s statement of ethical guidelines regarding medical research, is published in the three official languages of the WMA: English, French and Spanish.Methods: A detailed comparison of the three official language versions was carried out to determine ways in which they differed and ways in which the wording of the three versions might illuminate the interpretation of the document.Results: There were many minor linguistic differences between the three versions. However, in paragraphs 1, 6, 29, 30 and in the note of clarification to paragraph 29, there were differences that could be considered potentially significant in their ethical relevance.Interpretation: Given the global status of the Declaration of Helsinki and the fact that it is translated from its official versions into many other languages for application to the ethical conduct of research, the differences identified are of concern. It would be best if such differences could be eliminated but, at the very least, a commentary to explain any differences that are unavoidable on the basis of language or culture should accompany the Declaration of Helsinki. This evidence further strengthens the case for international surveillance of medical research ethics as has been proposed by the WMA

Was society’s response adequate in the cases of Mrs Pretty and Ms B?On the 11th of May, less than two weeks after losing her final legal appeal, Mrs Diane Pretty died, under sedation and in the care of a hospice. It was not the end she had pursued through the English High Court, the Court of Appeal, the House of Lords, and the European Court of Human Rights. Paralysed by motor neurone disease and unable to take her own life, Mrs Pretty wanted her husband to be allowed to help her to die when they decided the time had come. But in England, assisting suicide is a crime, although suicide itself no longer is, and the English courts refused Mrs Pretty’s request to grant her husband legal immunity. In turning to the European Court of Human Rights, Mrs Pretty argued that the English courts’ refusal had violated the European Convention on Human Rights.The European court, however, judged that there had been no violation. The right to life could not be construed as conferring a “right to die”, and consequently the state could not be required to “sanction actions intended to terminate life” in order to protect Mrs Pretty from the “inhuman or degrading treatment” to which she claimed the law on assisted suicide subjected her. The right to respect for private life , moreover, had to be exercised “in accordance with the law” of the state concerned. “States were entitled to regulate through the operation of the general criminal law activities which were detrimental to the life and safety of other individuals”; and such activities were what the English law against assisting suicide was designed to prevent. Exceptions to this law could not be allowed without undermining the …