Great Ormond Street Hospital Textbook of Paediatric Bioethics and Law is the first definitive reference to be produced by a world-leading children's hospital on the medical ethics and law applying to the care of children in a 21st century healthcare environment, exploring the challenges that children, their families, and those looking after them must face.
Healthcare professionals involved in the care of children are faced with controversies about decision-making, including genomics, personalised medicine, gene therapy, transplants, and the transfer of life-sustaining treatments from the ICU to the home. In addition, although patient safety and transparency are improving, recurrent high-profile worldwide institutional and individual failures have led to the need for mechanisms of external accountability and assessment. Open deliberation about the ethical issues increasingly faced in paediatrics and child health, backed by knowledge of the relevant law and considered together with children and their families, is the best solution for all these concerns.
This textbook enables better dialogue about the hard decisions made on a daily basis, considers how new and innovative treatments can be used in an ethical and lawful manner, and discusses when life sustaining therapy should be stopped, not started, or have limits set.
Joe Brierley, Simon Blackburn, David Archard
Dr Joe Brierley is Consultant Paediatric Intensive Care & Director of Paediatric Bioethics Centre, Great Ormond St Hospital (GOSH) for Sick Children, London. Past Medical President European Paediatric and Neonatal intensive Care (ESPNIC). Chair European Academy of Paediatrics Ethics Group. Chair ESOT PEDAT Group
Research interest in organ donation, severe sepsis, end of life care, ethics and law. Committee Royal College Paediatrics & Child Health. Chair European Academy of Paediatrics Ethics Group. Research interests: organ donation, severe sepsis, end of life care, ethics and law.
Simon Blackburn is a Consultant Paediatric and Neonatal Surgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital where he is also a member of the Clinical Ethics Committee. Simon is Co-Director of Education at Great Ormond Street and leads Great Ormond Street Learning Academy, which delivers Paediatric Healthcare Education at GOSH, as well as in the UK and Internationally. He is a Fellow of the Faculty of Surgical Trainers.
Simon has an active clinica practice in which he treats babies, children and young people at GOSH, with a particular focus on paediatric colorectal surgery.
David Archard is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Queen's University Belfast, having previously taught at the Universities of Ulster, St Andrews and Lancaster. He has published extensively in applied ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law, especially on the topics of children, the family, sexual consent, and the public role of philosophy.
He has been Honorary Chair of the Society for Applied Philosophy and is its Vice-President. For twelve years he was a Member of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, and latterly its Deputy Chair. He is currently Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the United Kingdom's de facto national ethics committee, Chair of the Ethics Advisory Group of the 'Every Story Matters' exercise of the UK's COVID Public Inquiry, and a Member of the Clinical Ethics Committee of Great Ormond Street Hospital.
