BMJ  2005;331:229-230 (23 July), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7510.229

Commentary

Ethics committees and countries in transition: a figleaf for structural violence?

Richard E Ashcroft, reader1

1 Imperial College London, London W6 8RP r.ashcroft@imperial.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Borovecki and colleagues argue that hospitals are ethical institutions, and that the norms they embody are subject to pressure and change as the institutions and their contexts change.1 They discuss how bioethics as an explicit way of discussing ethical norms and moral dilemmas has increasingly been institutionalised within Croatian hospitals, and analyse some of the defects of this process to date. In particular they identify three main features of hospital ethics committees which undermine their effectiveness: a continuing tradition of paternalism within medical practice; the bureaucratic, top-down implementation of ethics committees within the Croatian healthcare system; and the confusion of roles between hospital ethics committees and research ethics committees.

Some of their findings bear further analysis: for instance, it is not clear what is "average" in terms of the ethical knowledge of ethics committee members, either in absolute terms (what is the ideal for what they ought to know?) . . . [Full text of this article]


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