Clinical Bioethics Committees: a Brazilian experience.

Since its beginning, Bioethics has been related to medical decision making. In health settings, difficult dilemmas, critical situations, controversial decisions are problems that clinical Bioethics reflects on. Institutional Ethics Committees is a general and ambiguous denomination to many different activities.

Evolution of the medical practices and modes of death on pediatric intensive care units in southern Brazil.

Objectives: To study the possible change on mode of deaths, medical decision practices, and family participation on decisions for limiting life-sustaining treatments (L-LST) over a period of 13 yrs in three pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) located in southern Brazil.

Methods: A cross-sectional study based on a retrospective chart review (1988 and 1998) and on prospective data collection (from May 1999 to May 2000).

Setting: Three PICUs in Porto Alegre, southern Brazilian region.

[A sixteen-year epidemiological profile of a pediatric intensive care unit, Brazil].

Objective: To review epidemiological data from patients admitted to a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), Brazil, and to compare them to medical aspects associated to disease severity and mortality. Also, to profile these patients, including demographic data, disease prevalence, mortality rates and associated factors.

Methods: Retrospective data were collected from all patients admitted in a PICU of a university hospital between 1978 and 1994.