Ethics in practice

The LJPC is publishing in the education and debate section a monthly series of case based articles addressing ethical and legal issues in clinical practice. The aim of these articles is to provide a clear, up to date analysis of ethical issues confronting health professionals in their daily practice. The series is pitched at doctors and other health professionals who may not have had formal training in ethics. It seeks to describe a wide range of conundrums, difficult issues, and controversies and by doing so underline core concepts in medical ethics. Where possible we would like articles to be jointly authored by health professionals and specialists in medical ethics and/or law. In some cases, authors will be invited to provide a longer version of the article, up to 5000 words, to be published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, exploring the ethical issues in more depth.

The detailed format for articles in the series is as follows:

• please provide no more than 1500 –2000 words, 15 references, and 2-3 boxes/illustrations/figures. We are happy to put up additional and supporting resources on the web and these should be labelled w1, w2 etc.
• please begin the article with a succinct description of up to 500 words of a case raising a practical ethical issue. This will appear in a box at the start of the paper
• we hope that these articles will discuss real cases. When using a real case, it is essential that consent for this is obtained from patients. This may also present an opportunity for the paper to include a comment from the patient or an advocate, or perhaps in some cases, for the publication of a separate patient commentary to complement the paper
• the article should outline why the ethical issues raised by the case are relevant to clinical practice. Why is this a problem that needs addressing? What are the implications of not doing so for practice, patients, health professionals and so on? The aim in this section should be to capture the health professional reader’s interest by showing the practical importance of resolving the ethical issue
• please set out the options available to health professionals and patients in situations such as the one described in the case. In some articles these will be options for changes in policy rather than options in managing a particular case
• please discuss the morally significant reasons in favour of and against various courses of action. Articles should present an argument and should avoid being simply descriptive
• please present some practical conclusions about the case. These need not always take the form of a specific decision about the case but might sometimes involve a call for a change in policy, or for public debate of the issues raised
• if you can, please suggest in a box some additional educational resources (publications and websites) which will allow more interested readers to follow up the issues raised by the paper