Newswise — Nearly one in 10 obstetricians in a new study has considered giving up obstetric practice because of the emotional toll of stillbirths and infant deaths.
Three-quarters of the 804 obstetricians who responded to a survey by researchers at the University of Michigan Health System reported that the experience took a large emotional toll on [...]

[NYT] Regulators are cracking down on companies that sell genetic tests directly to consumers, threatening to crimp the growth of one of the hottest sectors of the biotechnology industry.
The California Department of Public Health sent “cease and desist” letters to 13 genetic testing companies two weeks ago, telling them they could not solicit business from [...]

Personalized medicine is such a prevalent and important topic within the biotech and healthcare industries, that it merits its own post.   It has been identified as one of the top drivers of biotech innovation by Ernst & Young, and promises to usher in much needed cheaper and safer healthcare.  Unsurprisingly, BIO hosted an entire track [...]

[wsj] In hospitals, medical-ethics teams are increasingly the arbiters of agonizing health decisions: helping parents and doctors plan care for a dying child, mediating among family members who disagree about removing a parent from life support, or steering patients in denial about a terminal illness toward end-of-life care.
But as the number of hospitals with ethics [...]

[Friday's Globe and Mail] Unlike doctors, scientists don’t have an ancient moral code like the Hippocratic oath. But graduate students beginning their careers in medical research at the University of Toronto now have their own solemn ceremony in which they pledge to conduct themselves in an ethical fashion.
Karen Davis, graduate co-ordinator at the Institute of [...]

The Bio International Convention hosted a fantastic panel today on the 2008 Ernst & Young global biotechnology report. The industry is at “the start of a revolution” and aiming to reinvent itself because of three trends, shared moderator Glen Giovannetti of Ernst & Young, (1) R&D productivity, (2) personalized medicine, and (3) globalization. This post [...]

A physician task force recently proposed guidelines for hospitals to follow in the face of a medical crisis.  The recommendations made by the doctors describe the characteristics of patients who should be denied treatment in order to save those who are more likely to survive.These physicians are concerned with the possibility of a flu pandemic, [...]

The New Orleans Hurricane Katrina disaster demonstrated the urgency not only of expanding the nation’s medical disaster preparedness and response plans, but it also highlighted the necessity of incorporating an ethical framework to guide decision-making into existing and emerging preparedness programs and policies. 
Hurricane Katrina stranded New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center in ten feet of [...]

The growing number and severity of natural disasters, especially in Asia, make it timely for governments to take a hard look at how to improve their national response. Just as there are scales for measuring the intensity of earthquakes and other disasters so should there be performance standards for measuring how governments respond. Without them, [...]

The University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics’ published a study on “Clinical Ethicists’ Perspectives on Organizational Ethics in Healthcare Organizations” highlighting four major organizational issues of concern:

Resource allocation
Moral distress and organizational moral climate
Conflicts of interest 
Clinical issues with a significant organizational dimension 

The study concluded that “the extent to which ‘clinical ethics’ cases were embedded with an organizational [...]