The morbidity and mortality conference serves an important educational role for physicians and underscores the importance of error disclosure in improving patient safety.
A physician argues in favor of moving family residency programs into local ambulatory clinics as a way to strengthen community-based physicians and link practical patient care to academic medical centers.
Research is often conducted without the knowledge or consent of those whose tissues are banked and poses possible harms to social groups if information about a few members is unscientifically applied to all.
There is much to be gained by integrating ethics and EBM, focusing on the implications of uncertainty for clinical practice and exploring the effect a clinician’s values have on acquisition and application of evidence.
The casebook developed by the Bander Center for Medical Business Ethics provides a comprehensive instrument for teaching medical business ethics decision making by exploring the effects of relevant variables on medical practice and research and reflecting on the values and motives that influence the behavior of health care professionals.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(8):744-749. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.8.medu1-1508.
Clinical equipoise—the idea that the community of medical experts is uncertain about the relative therapeutic merits of the arms of a clinical trial at its outset—mitigates physicians’ responsibility for patients’ poor outcomes when patients are assigned to the control arm or are harmed by an investigational agent.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(12):1108-1115. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.12.ecas1-1512.