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Living organ donation will soon become the source of the majority of organs donations for transplant. Should mentally handicapped people be allowed to donate, or should they be considered a vulnerable group in need of protection? I discuss three cases of possible living organ donors who are developmentally disabled, from three different cultures, the United States, Germany, and India. I offer a brief discussion of three issues raised by the cases: (1) cultural diversity and cultural relativism; (2) autonomy, rationality, and self-interest; and (3) the proper use and role for clinical ethics consults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the opportunity represented by the report `Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation,' to evaluate the progress of and set agendas for ethics consultation in the United States. Comparison of the committee- and consultant- approach to ethics consultation; Procedures for certifying ethics consultants; Outline of training programs in health care law.

Background: One of the barriers to interprofessional ethics education is a lack of resources that actively engage students in reflection on living an ethical professional life. This project implemented and evaluated an innovative resource for interprofessional ethics education., Objectives: The objective of this project was to create and evaluate an interprofessional learning activity on professionalism, clinical ethics, and research ethics., Design: The Brewsters is a choose-your-own-adventure novel that addresses professionalism, clinical ethics, and research ethics. For the pilot of the book, a pre-test/post-test design was used. Once implemented across campus, a post-test was used to evaluate student learning in addition to a student satisfaction survey., Participants and Research Context: A total of 755 students in six academic schools in a health science center completed the activity as part of orientation or in coursework., Ethical Considerations: The project was approved as exempt by the university's Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects., Findings: The pilot study with 112 students demonstrated a significant increase in student knowledge. The 755 students who participated in the project had relatively high knowledge scores on the post-test and evaluated the activity positively., Discussion: Students who read The Brewsters scored well on the post-test and had the highest scores on clinical ethics. Clinical ethics scores may indicate issues encountered in mass media., Conclusion: The Brewsters is an innovative resource for teaching interprofessional ethics and professionalism. Further work is needed to determine whether actual and long-term behavior is affected by the activity., (© The Author(s) 2014.)

Members of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs Standing Committee of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities present a collection of insights and recommendations developed from their collective experience, intended for those engaged in the work of healthcare ethics consultation.

A commentary on a case of a man who is left a "high quad" (ventilator dependant as well as quadriplegic) after an accident discusses the following: The right of patients who sustain catastrophic injuries to choose to discontinue life-sustaining treatment, The role of capacity assessment in treatment decisions and in ethics consultations, The role of advance directives (ADs) for such patients if they lack capacity, Whether a do-not-resuscitate or do-not-attempt-resuscitation order should be seen as "a medical order" or an advance directive, Some hints about what might be intended when a patient refers to the criterion of having a "meaningful life."

Interprofessional education and ethics education are two educational programs that blend together well, and, moreover, they are a natural fit for teaching in an academic health science center. The purpose of this paper is to describe our recent journey of developing and implementing an interprofessional ethics curriculum across the six schools of UTHealth. We provide an overview of the goals of the Campus-wide Ethics Program, which is housed in the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics, and we highlight certain innovative developments that are the result of the collaborative work of faculty and administrators from all six schools of UTHealth. In addition, a brief synopsis of the specific didactic and clinical courses in which ethics is a significant component is outlined for both the dental and the dental hygiene curricula. Lastly, we describe some of the recent scholarly activities that are a product of this new program. We are excited about our evolving efforts and the potential benefits of weaving interprofessional ethics within our school and across our campus. This article tells the story of our journey beyond "the silos" that are common among academic health science centers.

The dearth of philosophical contributions to medicine has recently been discussed in a series of articles in this journal. The present article focuses on physicians' lack of training in philosophy as a part of the explanation of the scarcity of works in philosophy of medicine. In section I I outline two philosophy courses which would be reasonable additions to the medical school curriculum required of all medical students. In section II I suggest two other philosophy courses as electives in a medical education. All four courses are in the fields of epistemology and metaphysics, and so will help others see the relevance to medicine of philosophical fields other than ethics.