More than ever before, clinicians are confronted with complex ethical issues in their medical practice. These include disagreements between patients, relatives, and healthcare staff over treatment decisions, difficulties in obtaining informed consent, and issues of medical error, truth-telling and patient confidentiality. Recognising the growing importance of ethical awareness in medicine, the recent Ethics in Practice report of the Royal College of Physicians (2005) concluded that key medical personnel should be suitably trained in clinical ethics. Increasingly, formal examinations in medicine assess applicants on aspects of clinical ethics.The new Applied Clinical Ethics (ACE) course is aimed at practising clinicians and members of CECs, focusing entirely on clinical ethics and practical decision-making. Several of the speakers are both clinicians and ethicists. The convenient arrangement of modules, each falling on a Saturday at monthly intervals, will enable practising clinicians to apply their knowledge in between sessions and attend the course without taking time off work. See the Course Website for further details.
NHS budgets are under considerable pressure. It is therefore unsurprising that many NHS Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) In England will aim to prioritise price in contract awards, But this approach is a significant threat to community-centred healthcare. While competitive tendering is a legally required, an excessive focus on costs in awarding NHS contracts risks overshadowing key factors such as established community trust, local expertise, and the long-term impact on continuity of care. This shift towards cheaper, often external, commercial providers threatens to cut the links between communities and their local health services. The argument that competitive tendering is solely about legal compliance, and not cost, is undermined by the very nature of such tendering, which by design encourages the lowest bid. This approach risks eroding the social fabric of local healthcare provision, where established relationships and understanding of specific community needs are essential. Establishe...
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