Bioethics in the Eastern Mediterranean Region: Bridging national, regional and global bioethics imperatives

For each of the 22 countries and territories in the region, mostly Arabic-speaking countries (7), bioethics is not only essential for operating and maintaining equitable and ethical health systems, it is also crucial for developing a resilient, efficient and evidence-informed health policymaking system. During normal (non-emergency) circumstances, bioethics governance, such as well-structured and locally informed guidelines, as well as national ethics committees (15) can help improve the management of health systems by enhancing transparency and accountability. Examples of such bioethics governance include the availability of clear guidelines for end-of-life care, which, in addition to respecting human dignity, can help hospitals reduce moral distress among clinicians and family members, make more efficient use of healthcare resources by reducing futile interventions, establish advance directives, expand the pool of transplantable organs, and even improve antibiotic stewardship by improving responsible use of antibiotics (16). [...]from a global perspective, the improvement of bioethics research, education, governance, application, and dialogue in the EMR, as well as its active contribution to the global bioethics discourse, would be beneficial at the global and regional levels.