Background Rationing and allocation decisions at the clinical level – bedside rationing – entail complex dilemmas that clinicians and managers often find difficult to handle. There is a lack of mechanisms and aids for ...

In a democratic welfare state, how should individual judgment be exercised and constrained when someone is making decisions on behalf of another who is not considered competent to make his or her own decisions? How should ...

Caesarean delivery is a common and life-saving intervention. However, it involves an overall increased risk for short-term and long-term complications for both mother and child compared with vaginal delivery. From a medical ...

Medicine is not merely a job that requires technical expertise, but a profession concerned with making the best decisions and recommendations with reference to, and in consultation with, the patient. This means that the ...

In this commentary on Williams and colleagues’ paper, I will address some essential issues related to research on contextual factors that influence value decision-making in healthcare. Based on the presumption that scientific ...

Providing heroin to people with heroin addiction taking part in medical trials assessing the effectiveness of the drug as a treatment alternative breaches ethical research standards, some ethicists maintain. Heroin addicts, ...

Background: Translational research in medicine requires researchers to identify the steps to transfer basic scientific discoveries from laboratory benches to bedside decision-making, and eventually into clinical practice. ...