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Article: The history of institutional ethics at Baylor University Medical Center.
- Article from:
- Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings
- Article date:
- January 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Baylor University Medical Center. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The discipline of clinical medical ethics guides both the moral stance of the total institution as well as the specific ethical decisions of physicians, nurses, and other health care providers. None would quarrel with the fact that a health care institution as a caring entity must have an ethical stance. This is made necessary by the obvious distinction between the pragmatic question of what can be done to patients within modern health care and the ethical question of what should be done for patients. The notion that an institution's ethical stance might be determined by a set of ideas rather than the needs of a particular vested interest is not always so obvious. It is ...