What are Hospital/Clinical Ethics Committees?

Hospital/clinical ethics committees (HEC) are chiefly designed to ensure good healthcare decision-making practices and to assist patients and healthcare professionals, but without interfering in the patient-physician relationship. A wide range of nomenclature such as health care ethics committees, clinical ethics committees, and clinical ethics support, is employed to designate HECs. Also, HECs are included in institutional ethics committees. In this article, Hospital/Clinic ethics committee designation is used. HECs are rare in Turkey and a false consideration, suggesting both clinical ethics committees and research ethics committees are the same committees, is very widespread, on the contrary. The purpose of this current article is to examine thoroughly HECs.