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Reconsidering Scarce Drug Rationing: Implications for Clinical Research

March 15, 2021
Hospital systems commonly face the challenge of determining just ways to allocate scarce drugs during national shortages. There is no standardised approach of how this should be instituted, but principles of distributive justice are commonly used so that patients who are most likely to benefit from the drug receive it....

A New Governance Overnance Approach to Regulating Human Genome Editing

December 10, 2020
For years, genomic medicine—medicine based on the growing understanding of the genetic contribution to many diseases and conditions—has been hailed as the future of medical treatment, but it has thus far had limited effect on day-to-day medical practice. The ultimate goal of genomic medicine has always been the ability not...

Reconsidering Scarce Drug Rationing: Implications for Clinical Research

November 30, 2020
Hospital systems commonly face the challenge of determining just ways to allocate scarce drugs during national shortages. There is no standardised approach of how this should be instituted, but principles of distributive justice are commonly used so that patients who are most likely to benefit from the drug receive it....

Incidental Enhancements: A Neglected Governance Challenge for Human Genome Editing Research

June 25, 2020
The increasing pace and international diffusion of developments in human genome editing research have prompted ongoing efforts to develop responsible governance for such research. One point of broad agreement across these efforts is that human genome editing research should prioritize medical applications over attempts to enhance human traits because of...

Professionalism and Ethics: A Standardized Patient Observed Standardized Clinical Examination to Assess ACGME Pediatric Professionalism Milestones

May 1, 2020
Introduction: The ethical skills fundamental to medical practice encompass a large portion of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) professionalism milestones. Yet many ethical practices are difficult to reduce to milestone frameworks given the variety of traditions of moral reasoning that clinician-trainees and their colleagues might properly employ....

Is Real-Time ELSI Realistic?

May 1, 2020
Background: A growing literature has raised—skeptically—the question of whether cutting-edge scientific research can identify and address broader ethical and policy considerations in real time. In genomics, the question is: Can ELSI contribute to genomics in real time, or will it be relegated to its historical role of after-the-fact outsider critique?...

Exploring the Emotional Labor of Medical Trainees in the Setting of Ethics Education

November 2, 2019
Julie Childers and Bob Arnold’s (2019) article, “The Inner Lives of Doctors: Physician Emotion in the Care of the Seriously Ill,” uses Kübler-Ross’s influential work on death and dying to remind us that the experiences contained within her framework relate not only to patients but also to members of their...

Clarifying a Clinical Ethics Service’s Value, the Visible and the Hidden

November 1, 2019
Our aim in this article is to define the difficulties that clinical ethics services encounter when they are asked to demonstrate the value a clinical ethics service (CES) could and should have for an institution and those it serves. The topic emerged out of numerous related presentations at the Un-Conference...

Perils of the Hidden Curriculum: Emotional Labor and “Bad” Pediatric Proxies

October 11, 2019
Today’s medical training environment exposes medical trainees to many aspects of what has been called “the hidden curriculum.” In this article, we examine the relationship between two aspects of the hidden curriculum, the performance of emotional labor and the characterization of patients and proxies as “bad,” by analyzing clinical ethics...

CEDG and HEC Welcome Sara Meyers and Lisa Michelson

October 3, 2019
Sara Meyers and Lisa Michelson have been selected as the new student leaders for the School of Medicine’s  Clinical Ethics Discussion Group This position also entails appointment to the UNC Hospital Ethics Committee. Outgoing leaders are Tyler Clay and Mark Baumgarten. Center for Bioethics faculty members Arlene Davis, Jean Cadigan, and...