مجله ایرانی اخلاق و تاریخ پزشکی
سال پنجم شماره 1 (بهمن 1390)

Conflict of interest is a real situation in which a person as a decision maker simultaneously has two positions, one in private and the other in the public. In public role he or she has to pay attention to the society`s best interests and follows his or her best ones as private role. Conflict of interest is a common challenge of health system among both real and legal persons in all courses such as education, treatment, and researches.The most causes of conflict of interest are named as deferent goals, lack of resources, authorities malfunction, health marketing and etc.We aimed at discussing conflict of interest and its relation to law, its management, conflict of interest in pharmacy and pharmaceutical companies and also Iranian legal system viewpoint. In conclusion it seems that conflict of interest should be included in the law and the provisions to achieve the least conflict of interests in health system should be revised.

Quality of nursing care services directly influences individuals’ health status. Compiling codes of ethics according to the religion and culture of each population could be an appropriate approach in improving quality of health care services especially nursing care. Hence, the most important priority in our national health system is developing ethical guidelines.For this purpose a task force has been established in collaboration with nurses, physicians, lawyers and clergymen who were expert in the field of medical ethics. The code of ethics for Iranian nurses was drafted in 2010. The draft that included 12 values and 71 regulations of professional ethics were finally approved in the second session of the Ethics Supreme Council of the Ministry of Health and Medical Education on 6 March, 2010. The values consist of concepts such as maintaining human dignity, adherence to professional obligations, accountability and responsibility, patient privacy, promotion of scientific and practical competence and respect to individual’s autonomy. Also, 71 regulations of professional ethics divided to five sections including "Nurse and Community" consisting of 9 items, “Nurse and Professional Commitments" with 14 items, "Nurse and Clinical Services" with 23 items, "The Nurse and Other Healthcare Providers in Medical Team" with 15 items, and also "Nurse, Education and Research" including 10 items.

Animal cloning is one of the animal biotechnology branches. Although this method has been used since 1950, but many have paid attention to cloning by birth of Dally. Because the way of Dolly production was completely different from other existed methods in cloning.This new-found and unprecedented method has been called “Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer” (SCNT), so scientists have eagerly paid attention to many profitable abilities such as, duplicating valued animals traits, preventing endangered animal species from extinction or even restoration of extinct animals, producing high quality food and drug by using cloning as a way for propagating transgenic animals.Even though all these instances sound good and encourage use of SCNT, in fact, none of them has practically become feasible so far. The main reason for this claim is that in spite of whole attempts taken for producing cloned animals, the method still is under debate and the hit-rates of this method has been kept considerably low and disappointing..Because of several reasons, we cannot ignore this recognized obstacle as low efficiency. Along with this issue, there are various sub-effects, which put human and animals life at risk. Not only the High rates of miscarriages or birth of genetically abnormal animals, causes many different health-oriented problems for human and animals, but also it can directly and indirectly endanger human and animals welfare. Nowadays hordes of legal and ethical criticism around SCNT in reaction to these portentous signs, invite scientists to be more scrupulous and patient in its broad enforcement.Taken together, although at first glance SCNT seems to be promising, it’s usefulness has been diminished because of difficulties in its application in broad spectrum. Therefore SCNT should be kept under surveillance and use of it must be just limited to very important and critical cases such as medical purposes, as long as all due observations and cautions take into account before implementing.

Because of complications of medical treatments, informing patients about the rate of treatment success, potential risks, and side- effects, is considered as an indispensable part of treatment contracts. Patients’ deprivation of this information can be considered as a major obstacle in obtaining informed consent. Clearly treatment without patients’ or their legal guardians informed consent may lead to civil and penal liability for the physicians.Consenting without getting enough information about the disease, and its treatment is the most important issue in this regard. Now can such consent be valid and legalize the treatment or not? In this article informed consent and the physicians duty of informing patients are compared in three legal systems of Iran, England and France and then the physicians’ duty of notification will be analyzed and some suggestions for safeguarding patients rights will be offered.

The main challenge in organ transplantation is the organ limitation. According to the law of organ donation, it’s necessary to obtain family consent for organ donation from a brain-dead patient in addition to patient consent. In this research, we explored Tehran citizens’ viewpoints regarding organ donation from beloved ones in case of brain death.In this cross-sectional study, two interviewers selected 706 study participants by phone interview through random digit dialing during February to November 2010. Calls were made between 6 and 9pm on 5 workdays. Companies and organizations were excluded from the study. Only those over 18 year of age were enrolled in the study.Of 1379 people who met the inclusion criteria, 706 subjects agreed to have the interview (response rate=51%). Of these, 83.3% (n=688) agreed with organ donation from family member if they had a donor card and suffered brain death. Agreement with organ donation was significantly associated with considering brain death to be real death (P=0.011) and considering it to be irreversible (P=0.028).In conclusion it is necessary to design public education programs to change their misconceptions about brain death, and provide options to opt for organ donation in case of brain death on common cards such as drivers’ license so that family members can make decisions about organ donation more easily when a beloved one suffers brain death.

Euthanasia, to end easily the life of a terminally ill patient, is one of the most controversial ethical issues which there are not enough information about it in Iranian society. Valid and reliable instruments can facilitate research in this issue. The current study aimed at assessing the rate of acceptance of euthanasia in a group of college students, and studying validity and reliability of the Euthanasia Attitude Scale (EAS). Four hundred and thirty seven students judged about morality of euthanasia (by accepting euthanasia scale), and then completed the EAS. To analyze the data, indices of descriptive and inferential statistics including factor analysis and convergent validity were used. The results show that only 27.9 percent of the participants agree with euthanasia. There was a strong correlation between euthanasia acceptance and ethical considerations. Factor analysis of the EAS confirmed a three factor structure. Cronbach’s alpha for the EAS was 0.88 and its correlation with euthanasia acceptance score was 0.54 which indicate internal consistency reliability and convergent validity of the EAS. According to these findings, most of the students are against euthanasia and their opposition to euthanasia mostly is due to Ethical Considerations within the domains of euthanasia attitude. Moreover, this study showed that the Persian version of the Euthanasia Attitude Scale is a valid instrument for assessing attitudes toward euthanasia.

Nurses face to a lot of different gender perspectives in their routine work. Cultural and social backgrounds influence gender stereotyping and it causes significant changes in nursing roles. This article reviews and analyzes the effect of gender on nursing. Gender perspective in nursing has affected services and quality of nursing practices. Although gender perspective affects health care system, its elimination is not beneficial. Because its elimination abducts nursing from its real spirit and disappoint women from exposing their emotional and mental abilities. Therefore gender stereotyping affects nursing from different dimensions and it will improve nursing profession by leading right way.

One of the most important factors for effective function in an organization is human factor. Social support is known as a psychocognitional factor in workplace that affects human productivity. The purpose of this study was to determine the rate of perceived social support at domain of emotional support among hospital staff. In this cross-sectional study, 120 hospital staff who worked at a selected hospital of Isfahan were included based on convenience sampling. Data was collected using social support and demographic data questionnaires. These questionnaires were developed by researcher. The validity of questionnaires was evaluated by content analysis and reliability of questionnaires was evaluated by test re-test and data were analyzed by descriptive and analytical statistics.Our results show that perceived social support at the domain of emotional support from coworkers (mean ± SD=3.34±0.9) was significantly more than perceived social support at domain of emotional support from managers (mean± SD =2.58±0.88). Also, a significant association was found between perceived social support at the domain of emotional support and age and work experience (P<0.005).In conclusion social support from personnel at the domain of emotional support is necessary for increasing human productivity and hospital managers can affect staff efficiency by developing their relationship with hospital personnel.