Ethical Problems in Clinical Practice: The Ethical Reasoning of Health Care Professionals

by Søren Holm

How do doctors and nurses identify ethical problems in their daily work? And how do they assess these ethical problems? Despite a burgeoning literature about how and what health care professionals ought to think about ethical issues, there are suprisingly few studies looking into how they actually do think. This new study provides a throrough analysis of the ethical reasoning of doctors and nurses. Based on extensive interviews, Søren Holm shows how qualitative research methods can be used to study ethical reasoning, and that the results of such studies are important for normative ethics, that is, in thinking about how health care professionals ought to act. A significant and original contribution to work on the theory and method of bioethics.

224 pages, Paperback

Published February 15, 1998