In turn, this continuing health care revolution puts Hopkins clinicians on the front line in the struggle to balance the miracles of biotechnology with considerations of cost, quality of life, and access to care. Every day is full of medical miracles. Yet, frequently, these miracles present patients and their families with complicated decisions they feel ill prepared to handle. Ethical considerations are not limited to the beginning and end of life, but span the entire lifetime of the patient. Clinical ethics focuses on the roles and responsibilities of health care professionals and the ethical issues that arise in providing patient care.
Biomedical research continues to improve the quality of our lives, but it involves risk.
Hopkins will continue to lead the way in these and other areas of biomedical research, but the new approaches we espouse will require dramatic changes in what we do in health care delivery and professional training. As advances in medicine increase the costs of health care, questions arise about the allocation of health resources. Difficult ethical dilemmas emerge when policies aimed at advancing the public's health conflict with other societal value. The challenges of bioethics to private moral choice and public policy formulation raise numerous difficult questions. Advances in bioethics require the integration of abstract moral and political analysis with the practical worlds of medical care, biomedical science, health policy, and the law.