Ethical issues in Maltese general practice : a look to the near future

Abstract

On the eve of Family Practice becoming a speciality, it is only appropriate to discuss the ethical implications and also the problems still seemingly unresolved in this area. I shall divide my short time between a reflection on family medicine as a speciality as expressed in the thought of Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, himself a specialist in internal medicine but who believed and advocated family medicine as a speciality before it became such in the United States, and the current state of affairs in Malta. Edmund Pellegrino was founder of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics in Georgetown University, Washington, D.e. Whilst the latter has become somewhat of a Mecca for bioethicists, Pellegrino himself is the guru, if not the father, of modern bioethics. A proponent of virtue-based ethics, he is a staunch believer in the tradition of medicine as based in the doctor-patient relationship. It is in this phenomenon that we should look for resolution of ethical dilemmas and not merely in the algorithmic invocation of principles and rules.