Medically Assisted Dying Practices: What Role for Clinical Ethicists?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Medically assisted dying (AD) practices have been legalized in several jurisdictions throughout the world over the last two decades. Because of this increased trend, more individuals now have access to a self-chosen death. Despite its legalization and the diversity of frameworks governing AD, it remains fraught with ethical challenges. However, there is a dearth of literature regarding the specific roles clinical ethicists (CEs) may have in AD provision. We sought to address this literature gap by: (1) Gathering healthcare professionals' (HPs) and CEs perspectives on how CEs may contribute; (2) Identifying how CEs may have been involved thus far; (3) Identifying promising practices and pitfalls related to their involvement. An exploratory qualitative study using focus groups, purposive and snowball sampling. Four online focus groups were held. Groups comprised of (1) HPs and (2) CEs from Quebec and Switzerland. Data was analyzed using thematic analysis. Altogether 21 persons participated, among them 10 ethicists and 11 HPs. Four major themes were identified: (1) Specific Roles for CEs; (2) CEs competencies deemed useful in AD provision; (3) Operationalization of CEs' involvement 5) Obstacles/Pitfalls associated to CEs' involvement in AD. Several roles for CEs have been identified that have been associated with specific ethical challenges that arise in AD. Findings indicate that CEs' integration in AD should be context dependent and should consider several misconceptions associated with the field of clinical ethics in general.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.074 | 0.460 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it