Hospitals and moral imperatives: hospital ethics.

... Because institutional ethics has been neglected, there is a tendency in our institutional life to apply moral principles with which we are familiar from our personal life. However, principles from individual ethics often distort institutional ethics. Ethical problems in the hospital are not exactly the same as ethical problems that arise when individual doctors treat individual patients. And when the problems are similar, the ethical principles by which we should resolve them are likely to be quite different. To begin to make a case for taking hospital ethics seriously, I briefly examine two familiar principles of individual doctor-patient ethics that look different, or should look different, in the setting of a hospital. I then discuss ethics committees -- one of the most important ways in which hospital ethics is put into practice.