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Hospitals should have a specialist in medical ethics on hand to advise doctors, a leading expert says.

Imperial College London medical ethicist Daniel Sokol said medics are increasingly facing dilemmas about treatment as technology progresses.

Only one in five hospitals have ethics committees, which Mr Sokol believes are not flexible or approachable enough. Writing in the British Medical Journal, he said the UK should adopt the US model of employing clinical ethicists.

He said medical ethics was a complex area - citing the length of British Medical Association ethics handbook which runs to 823 pages - and doctors could not expect to be fully versed in it by traditional training.

Commenting in his paper, Mr Sokol said:

"A sound knowledge of medical ethics is essential to the good practice of medicine.

Clinical ethics committees cannot alone cope with the demands of ethically troubled doctors at the coalface. The use of clinical ethicists would represent an important step forward."

The call comes after a series of high-profile cases reached the courts when doctors and the families of patients could not agree on treatment.

The High Court is currently considering the case of Charlotte Wyatt, a seventeen month-old baby who is severely brain damaged after being born prematurely.

Her parents want to overturn an earlier order which gave doctors the legal right not to resuscitate Charlotte as she felt "continuing pain".

In another case, the High Court sided with doctors who had asked for permission to withhold life-saving treatment from nine-month-old Luke Winston-Jones, who was terminally ill with heart and breathing problems, if his condition deteriorated.

Luke, from Anglesey in north Wales, died in November.

Muiris Lyons, Solicitor acting for Ruth Winston-Jones, Luke's mother, said:

"There is an increasing tendency for courts and lawyers to be called on to resolve these difficult medico-legal and ethical dilemmas; not just in the UK, but also in the US, where the recent high-profile case of Terri Schiavo highlighted the debate over the right to life versus the right to die with dignity and personal autonomy.

We have recently been involved in several high profile cases concerning these sorts of issues, including the Luke Winston-Jones right to life case, and the Natallie Evans frozen embryo case.

These cases raise challenging issues for all the professionals involved, and in addition to legal expertise require careful and sympathetic handling.

I welcome this move towards establishing a specialist in medical ethics in hospitals to advise doctors on complex cases like these. This would represent a very positive step towards supporting doctors in this incredibly difficult decision making process."

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