Ethics

Have healthcare professionals abandoned their ethical codes?

Ros Jones

Explicit ethical principles and values have long been recognised as constituting essential frameworks to guide the day-to-day activities of professionals working in healthcare. Any newly qualified practitioner – doctor, nurse, psychologist, therapist – is routinely directed towards the relevant ‘code of ethics’ document and told that it is imperative to abide by these doctrines throughout their career.
Yet, despite their purported importance in ensuring sound clinical practice, throughout the covid event, these foundational guidelines were habitually ignored by all of the healthcare professions…

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Does mother know best?

HART Editor

The cost-benefit decisions that drive NHS spending can be hard to reconcile. On one hand, loving parents face roadblocks from courts and medical experts when seeking life-saving treatments for their children. On the other, vast sums are spent on COVID-19 interventions, raising the question: What is a life truly worth, and who gets to decide? Shouldn’t loving parents have more say when the stakes are so high?

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HART Ethics

HART Editor

Several members of HART are authors of a new pre-print on ethics. It takes an in-depth look at the historical and ethical framework that has guided medical practices for centuries—from the Hippocratic Oath to modern legal standards like the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki.

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Book Review – Will Ellsworth-Jones’ We Will Not Fight (2008)

HART Editor

Like with so much history that is shrouded by the mists of time, the detailed tales of the thousands of British men who refused to fight in the First World War make for fascinating reading.  These conscientious objectors came from all walks of life – socialists, communists, pacifists, Quakers, Jehovah’s witnesses, Methodists, the Bloomsbury Set – and found a unity of purpose in their protest, allowing them – for a time being at least – to put aside quite substantial ideological differences.  

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The Cape Byron Lighthouse Declaration

HART Editor

In early 2023, three Australian health professionals who had all been ‘struck off’ for speaking out against their government’s pandemic response, decided they must speak up for medical ethics and freedom of debate.  They met and set up the Cape Byron Lighthouse declaration. The declaration’s four aims would have been uncontroversial only a few years ago.

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NUDGE DENIALISM: Why are the state’s psychological experts distancing themselves from behavioural science?

HART Editor

The state’s reliance on behavioural science strategies – ‘nudges’ – to facilitate the public’s compliance with covid restrictions has been widely documented. The many psychologists and behavioural scientists advising the government during the covid event (such as those in the SAGE subgroup, SPI-B, and the Behavioural Insight Team, BIT ) have, reasonably, been assumed to hold a significant degree of responsibility for using these methods of persuasion in communication campaigns

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