Until recently, consideration of ethics in health care has been limited to health professional/patient and interprofessional relations. This state of affairs follows from a general decline in the influence of religious and philosophical thinking in guiding responses to the day to day concerns of health care. The expansion of medical knowledge and technology in recent years - with the influence of human genetics among the most important developments - has led to increased recognition of ethical questions and concerns. In response to these continuing developments, bioethics has emerged as a new, cooperative and collaborative undertaking which seeks to bring together the range of thinking relevant to contemporary health care issues being addressed in a number of disciplines. Bioethics is concerned with the problems facing decision-makers at clinical, professional and policy levels and seeks to encourage the involvement of the public in medical-ethical debates.