Ethics Committees' Practices in Healthcare, Banking and Research: Key Requirements for Their Functionality

To meet concerns about ethical and unethical behavior in their work environments and workplaces, organizations began establishing ethics programs that contain ethics committees (ECs). There is now a tradition and diverse use of ECs for ethical decision-making in many different organizational settings. In addition, ECs have been subject to many publications in books and articles in the scientific literature. Yet, until now no comparative analysis has been published that brings together ECs' practices in different sectors.

This article aims to bridge this knowledge gap and illustrate which main requirements for ECs' practices need to be addressed to help ECs meet their anticipated functions.

To do so, this paper lays out a study based on an exploratory, qualitative design using focus groups and individual expert interviews that compare ECs' practices in the healthcare, banking, and scientific research sectors (as far as dual use of research is concerned).

Based on the results of this study we were able to make a distinction between two main categories: moral authority and trustworthiness. We were also able to identify three sub-categories: legitimation, mode, and outreach.

Based on the exploratory analysis in this study, we conclude that there are the following three distinct main requirements for the functionality of ECs: (1) a dialog between EC members and other stakeholders, (2) an approach that considers various possible modes (reactive, screening, moderating, and preventive) to enhance the quality of ECs' decision-making processes and (3) an outreach to all relevant EC stakeholders for the further validation of the main requirements found for ECs functionality.