title: Towards clinical bioethics (or a return to clinical ethics?).
abstract: Medical ethics has traditionally been oriented towards the clinical setting. Since the middle of the last century, however, various circumstances (associated mainly, though not exclusively, with rapid advances in technology and knowledge) have considerably broadened both the field of enquiry and the scope of this discipline. This is due partly to the overlap between medical ethics and bioethics, which in recent decades has acquired its own identity and concerns a multitude of ethical aspects in the biomedical field. Clinical ethics taps into the vast wealth of deontology, so that it has no need for additional criteria or principles, or for the definition of new values: rather, it recognizes the need to apply existing criteria, principles and values to contingent circumstances and contexts. A special role is reserved for ethics committees and, above all, for clinical ethics consultants, although in some countries the former are concerned mainly with authorisations for clinical trials. Clinical ethics consultants, however, may have a more incisive influence in clinical decisions: the special requisites and skills they need have been defined and discussed in various documents which are mentioned briefly in the present article. The presence of these consultants does not exonerate clinical physicians from their responsibilities or from liability for their decisions, in the formation of which they must refer constantly to codes of professional ethics.
authors.affiliation: Office of the President, Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Italian National Institute of Health), Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Petrini
mesh_terms: D001675:Bioethics; D026822:Ethicists; D017041:Ethics Committees / Q000458:organization & administration; D026690:Ethics, Clinical; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D006801:Humans; D010820:Physicians / Q000941:ethics