EDITORIAL
General practitioners face ethico-legal problems too!
1 Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK
2 University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk, UK
3 University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
4 St George’s School of Medicine, University of London, London, UK
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to Professor Len Doyal, Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK; l.doyal@qmul.ac.uk
Keywords: ethics
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Much of the orthodox literature on medical ethics and law emphasises hospital care. This is because many of the classic dilemmas chosen for analysis are drawn from acute medicine in a secondary care setting. Do patients have the right to refuse life saving treatment? In the face of scarcity in intensive care, who should be treated and for what reason? Should adolescent young women be allowed to have abortions without parental consent? In what circumstances should life sustaining treatment be withdrawn? The list goes on. One might infer from this focus on secondary care that primary care clinicians face fewer and less interesting dilemmas and, indeed, have an easier moral and legal time of it. In fact, there are good arguments to the contrary.12 It is these quandaries, and the personal demands that they make on general practitioners (GPs), that is the topic for this issue’s section on ethics and
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