A healthy 25-year-old primigravida with a spontaneous singleton pregnancy at 32+3 weeks’ gestation presents for a routine prenatal visit accompanied by her husband. Her primary care provider just left on a three-month sabbatical. Pregnancy dating was confirmed by first-trimester sonography. All maternal-fetal aspects of routine prenatal care have been unremarkable, and the patient has not experienced any pregnancy complications. There is no history of mental health disorders, and the patient practices a healthy lifestyle.

The movement toward increasing maternal age comes with many new challenges. As reproductive physicians now see increasingly older patients, they are also confronted with complex ethical questions regarding the medical, psychological, and psychosocial implications of providing services to this population. It is well established that increased maternal age is associated with many obstetric complications. These complications may have both short and long-term effects on the mother as well as the fetus and child. In addition to medical complications, many providers are concerned about psychosocial ramifications of pregnancies at the extremes of maternal age. These concerns largely pertain to the well-being of children born to older parents, and are often subject to societal and cultural norms. These factors combined have led many to question the ethics of providing ART to patients in their 40s and beyond, however most ethical scrutiny has been aimed at post-menopausal mothers and those greater than 50 years of age. This chapter explores the ethical issues and available guidance in relation to this group of patients and the practical application of medical ethics and the core ethical principles.

Ethical thinking is an indispensable component of sound professional practice across all areas of applied psychology. Within it, practitioners seek to take account of both the principles formulated in codes of conduct and the rights of all the involved participants. In this chapter we first describe the background to and the fundamental concepts of normative ethics before examining the agreed practical ethical principles that determine standards of work and the processes of ethically aware decision making. We identify the major sources of philosophical thought that have influenced the development of professional codes of practice. Examining the implications of this in a variety of contexts in forensic psychology, we focus on the most frequently encountered moral dilemmas and challenges that arise. They are drawn from the areas of working with clients, professional supervision, and research; and involve issues such as the protection of confidentiality, avoidance of role conflicts, resolution of the sometimesincongruent priorities of individual and public domains, and management of boundaries in professional relationships.

Being a safe and ethical nurse in health care requires an understanding of the frameworks that underpin and guide nursing practice. A generalised healthcare safety system known as clinical governance is implemented to ensure the wellbeing of all those in the healthcare system.

In addition to a clinical governance framework, healthcare staff also work within ethical and legal frameworks that underpin and govern their practice. In a nurse’s daily practice, every action is based on the need to make informed decisions, which are based on the nurse’s moral and ethical principles, their knowledge and understanding of different clinical situations and the legal accountabilities underpinning nursing practice. To make informed decisions, nurses must be aware of their own ethical stance and consider this, together with legal and professional requirements such as the codes of ethics and professional conduct (ICN, 2012, NMBA 2018), and the Registered Nurse Standards for Practice (NMBA 2016).

This chapter discusses the frameworks that guide practice. It introduces the concepts of quality and safety, clinical governance, clinical risk, ethical issues and the tenets of professionalism.

Working with human remains raises a host of ethical issues. This chapter explores whether there is a universal ethical approach to human remains or whether this idea is so general as to be little more than a broad statement. The chapter also provides a more general introduction to ethics. It is essential to have a good understanding of what this discipline actually means if curators and researchers are to act in truly ethical ways. In the literature discussing human remains there are only a few examples where general ethical principles are addressed. Most gloss over this aspect as if this understanding is a given. It is not. Many people, both involved in working with remains or not, have at best a sketchy understanding of ethics, yet we as academics and museum professionals are expected to draw up ethical codes and statements, which if they are to be more than a box-ticking exercise must be based on a firm understanding of the issues.