This book is first a formal response to those queries: an attempt to answer the questions in a systematic fashion. Second, it is an attempt to provide the knowledge gathered from ethics committees that have pioneered this work to ethics committees that are just starting out and to people who are just beginning to serve on such committees. Finally, we hope this book will provide a second generation of questions for ethics committees that have by now come to terms with the first generation of questions. This book is not a definitive on the role ethics committees in health care. It is an initial statement of where we find ourselves now and what our experience have been so far. We do not know the future of ethics committees. That will depend, at least in part, on the quality of care that ethics committee members put into their work. What we do know is that the need to carefully consider ethical problems in patient care will continue to grown in the years to come.