Oral health care professionals are becoming increasingly aware that almost every clinical consultation raises scientific, ethical and legal challenges. While scientific challenges may be resolved using an evidence-based medicine (EBM) approach, moral complexity must be resolved using ethical theory to justify decision making in the face of ethical conflict. Ethics and the dental team, the first book of its kind in South Africa, provides the theoretical background necessary for the resolution of ethical dilemmas.

Ethics and the dental team uses case studies to demonstrate how to identify, analyse and apply ethical, moral and value concepts to scenarios that are encountered on a daily basis.

Topics covered include the following:

• Theories and principles of ethics
• Professionalism
• The ethics of HIV/AIDS
• Health and human rights
• Research ethics and scientific integrity

In view of the increasing emphasis on ethical considerations in health care from the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA), Ethics and the dental team is not only essential reading for dental, dental therapy and oral hygiene students, but also for practising dentists and their entire dental team. 

Keymanthri Moodley is an associate professor in Family Medicine and head of the Bioethics Unit at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Stellenbosch. In 2004 she completed her doctorate in philosophy and her dissertation involved a critical assessment of the work of research ethics committees in South Africa. Prof. Moodley is responsible for undergraduate and postgraduate ethics teaching in the faculty. She works as an investigator on clinical trials, conducts good clinical practice (GCP) and research ethics training for investigators and has served on the Research Ethics Committee at the faculty.

Sudeshni Naidoo is a professor and senior specialist in the Department of Community Dentistry, Faculty of Dentistry at the University of the Western Cape. She is a specialist in Dental Public Health and obtained her PhD in 2003. She is responsible for undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in ethics, health and human rights and research ethics.