Development of clinical ethics committees

doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7445.950

From trainee to consultant, BMJ Group offers doctors around the world tailored information, special events, learning resources and recruitment services at every step along their career path.

... by doctors, for doctors, for patients
We are open for entries!

Online learning

BMJ Learning

High-quality CME / CPD for doctors and other healthcare professionals. BMJ Learning features hundreds of accredited, peer-reviewed learning modules in text, video, and audio formats. Find out more

Courses and Qualifications

BMJ Masterclasses

BMJ Masterclasses, led by experts, help clinicians to use the latest evidence and recent guidelines in practice and meet their CPD/CME requirements. Find out more

Exam Preparation

The leading provider of online exam preparation, helping over 167,000 healthcare professionals to pass their exams. Find out more

onExamination

Search all BMJ education articles:

From

Limit by

Access to the full text of this article requires a subscription or payment. Please log in or subscribe below.

Anne Slowther, research fellow (anne-marie.slowther@ethox.ox.ac.uk)1,
Carolyn Johnston, Clinical ethics network project officer1,
Jane Goodall, Clinical ethics network administrator1,
Tony Hope, director1

¹Ethox Centre, Institute of Health Sciences, Oxford OX3 7LF

Correspondence to: A Slowther

Accepted 9 February 2004

Support for dealing with ethical issues in clinical practice should be an integral part of patient care

Clinical practice raises a wide variety of ethical issues that can be difficult for individual doctors to resolve. Some NHS trusts have established clinical ethics committees to provide ethical support. These committees had largely worked alone until a meeting of committee representatives in January 2001 led to the development of the UK Clinical Ethics Network. The principal aims of the network are to promote the development of clinical ethics support in the United Kingdom, to encourage a high level of ethical debate in clinical practice, and to facilitate sharing of best practice between clinical ethics committees (box 1).1 We consider the emergence of clinical ethics support in the context of similar development in other countries.

What is clinical ethics support?

Clinical ethics support can be described as the provision of support and advice to health professionals and patients on ethical issues arising from clinical practice or patient care. The support can take different forms, but in the United Kingdom the most common model is a committee or group sitting within an NHS trust, usually an acute trust. These committees are multidisciplinary and include lay members. Issues are referred to the committee by clinicians and managers, and some committees are now being approached by local general practitioners. Few committees include patients or their families directly in committee discussions.

The number of trusts with clinical ethics committees is increasing. In 2001 the Nuffield Trust published a survey of all NHS trusts that identified 20 …