Preface

Douglas S. Diekema, Mark R. Mercurio, and Mary B. Adam

This is a book for individuals who struggle with the ethical issues that inevitably arise when providing medical care to children. The contributing authors possess expertise in clinical ethics and experience in the clinical world. Most of the authors are clinicians, intimately familiar with the issues they discuss in their chapters. Those who are not clinicians serve as ethics consultants in clinical settings. All of the authors have struggled with difficult ethical situations involving children.

The three of us have been teaching clinical ethics to undergraduates, medical students, and residents for a combined total of over 50 years. Because our clinical practice is pediatrics, most of our teaching involves clinical ethics as it relates to the care of children and their families. Twenty years ago, one of us (DSD) developed a structured curriculum for teaching clinical ethics to the pediatric residents at Seattle Children’s Hospital. A description of that curriculum was published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine in 1997 (Diekema & Shugerman, 1997). That article generated significant interest, including pleas from residency programs around the country for resources to help teach the topics outlined in that paper. At the same time physicians and trainees frequently ask whether we can recommend a book that provides a good overview of pediatric ethics. But while there are some terrific books that deal with specific areas within the field (research ethics, neonatal ethics, decision-making on behalf of children), we find ourselves at a loss in identifying a volume that provides a comprehensive overview of the rich array of issues faced by those who care for children in the medical context. This volume is an attempt to provide such a resource.