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This article is part of a series on ICU Leadership and management, edited by Thomas E Stewart.

Review

Bench-to-bedside review: Ethical challenges for those in directing roles in critical care units

Robert W Sibbald1 email and Neil M Lazar2 email

1Research Associate, Department of Medicine and Joint Centre for Bioethics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

2Associate Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine and Joint Centre for Bioethics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

author email corresponding author email

Critical Care 2005, 9:76-80doi:10.1186/cc2979

Published: 15 October 2004

Abstract

Though much attention in the medical literature has focused on the ethics of critical care, it seems to be disproportionately weighted toward clinical issues. On the presumption that the operational management of an intensive care unit (ICU) also requires ethical considerations, it would be useful to know what these are. This review undertook to identify what literature exists with regard to the non-clinical issues of ethical importance in the ICU as encountered by clinician–managers. We found that in addition to issues of resource allocation, there exist many areas of ethical importance to clinician–managers in the ICU that have been described only superficially. We argue that a renewed focus on ICU ethics is merited to shed light on these other, non-clinical, issues.


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