Ethics committees.

Abstract

Three kinds of ethics committees should be distinguished, the mandatory local hospital or clinic-based committee, the statutory national committee set up to issue licences, or survey issues highlighted by local committees, or in the national press, reporting to Parliament, and publishing annual reports; and the committee established either temporarily or on a permanent basis to examine outstanding and general problems in the morals of medical practice and research, and to advise Ministers as to possible changes in the law. At all levels, such committees will be concerned with moral problems, and can never, therefore, be expected to come up with uniquely 'correct' solutions. Nevertheless they are essential both to reassure the public and to give guidance to the medical profession, both in clinical practice and research. Such committees should, at all levels, have a non-medical chairman, and a high proportion of 'lay' members. They must have regard to common moral sentiments, and to what will be morally acceptable in the country as a whole (though they can never hope for total agreement with their conclusions). Their recommendations, being in the sphere of public rather than private morality will be as far as possible the outcome of consensus, without which legislation is not possible.