Clinical Ethics - Public Consultation for the Draft WHO Guidance

Submit your comments on the Draft WHO Guidance on Clinical Ethics by June 30, 2025.

Over the past decades, clinical ethics has gained increasing prominence within the broader field of global health ethics. The COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, has highlighted numerous clinical ethics challenges, ranging from resource allocation at the bedside to the provision of unproven therapies. Although the World Health Organization (WHO) has occasionally addressed specific clinical ethics issues through its ethics guidance, there remains a lack of comprehensive, general WHO guidance on clinical ethics and its governance. The need for such a document has been repeatedly expressed by WHO Member States, technical departments, and the Global Network of WHO Collaborating Centers for Bioethics.

This initiative is intended to provide comprehensive, context-sensitive ethical guidance to support healthcare decision-making globally and to assist a wide range of stakeholders. These include Member States and health policymakers, WHO technical departments, healthcare workers (including both medical professionals and non-professional health personnel), health facility administrators, international and national professional medical organizations (such as medical councils and professional associations), healthcare workers' unions, ethics oversight agencies, related UN agencies, the medical education sector, non-governmental and civil society organizations (including patients' rights advocacy groups), and other relevant entities.

To develop this draft guidance, WHO has consulted with an internal steering committee, the Global Network of WHO Collaborating Centers for Bioethics, and participants of several relevant events, including the International Conference on Clinical Ethics and Consultation (ICCEC-2023), the World Congress of Bioethics (WCB-2024), and the Australian Association of Bioethics and Health Law Conference (AABHL-2024). An international expert group was formed in 2023, with members representing all WHO regions. In addition to the independent experts on the committee, representatives from observer organizations—including the World Medical Association, the International Council of Nurses, and the World Patient Alliance—have been invited to participate in the working group. The group has convened regularly on a monthly basis to discuss the development of the work, under the coordination of the Health Ethics and Governance Unit at WHO headquarters in Geneva.

To ensure transparency, inclusiveness, and relevance across diverse global contexts, WHO is launching this public consultation on the draft guidance to gather feedback from a wide range of stakeholders. This public consultation aims to make the development of the WHO Clinical Ethics Guidance a participatory and inclusive process. By leveraging digital tools for structured input, WHO seeks to refine the draft into a robust, context-sensitive, and globally applicable resource to support ethical decision-making in healthcare.

The online public consultation will remain open until 11:59 PM on Monday, 30 June 2025 (Central European Time, GMT/UTC +1). Please note that this is an unedited and unformatted draft, shared solely for consultation purposes and not for citation. The final version will undergo full language editing prior to publication. Respondents are kindly requested not to comment on language unless a term is perceived to carry substantive ethical, technical, or cultural significance. All feedback will be reviewed with care and held in strict confidence by WHO; it will not be shared with third parties and will be used exclusively to inform the development of this guidance on Clinical Ethics and related outputs. A summary of the key themes and feedback, along with anonymized demographic and stakeholder group representation, may be published on the WHO website. Finally, please note that the final version of the guidance will be completed and become more applicable by adding an executive summary and a recommendations section.