Ethics consultation soon will have defined role
Task force will issue draft report in November
A task force working on the development of professional standards for ethics consultation has completed 18 months of work and will issue a draft of its findings at a national ethics meeting in early November.
"Our primary goal is not to be completely comprehensive, but to set some initial core competencies for professionals who are doing ethics consults," says Mark Aulisio, PhD, research associate at the Center for Medical Ethics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and executive director of the task force.
The final outcome is bound to have an effect on every institutional ethics committee mem- ber nationwide who does ethics consultation. A representative of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, as well as other professional groups such as the American Medical Association, has actively participated as a task force member. It is expected that these accrediting bodies subsequently will issue some guidelines for ethics consultation services.
Before the combined national meeting of the Society for Health and Human Values in McLean, VA, the Society for Bioethics Consultation in Cleveland, and the American Association of Bio-ethics in Minneapolis, members of the three sponsoring societies received copies of the draft report. A morning session of the professional conference has been set to discuss the professional standards report. (For more on the task force, see Medical Ethics Advisor, April 1997, p. 43.)
"We are attempting to make the competencies general so that they can be used in any health care setting," Aulisio says.
An indirect benefit of creating specific core competencies for those who conduct ethics consultation would be consistency and increased trust and acceptance of this service by other professionals in the health care setting and family members, he adds.
"A worthy side effect would be that the ethical dimensions of some end-of-life issues would be better handled," says Aulisio.
The task force members stress that the scope of their discussions involves ethics consultation and policy development, not ethics education. The group does not intend to recommend continuing medical education requirements, Aulisio says. One of the questions expected to be answered in the task force report is whether ethics consultations, or the guidance of an ethics committee team, should be required in certain circumstances.
Aulisio stresses that the task force wants the input of all members of the field who will be affected by its report. He expects to spend four months following the national meeting to take comments from professionals.
The task force has scheduled a follow-up meeting for late February 1998, at which time the group of 21 professionals will write a final draft of the recommendations. At press time, the draft report was to be posted on the Internet in late October at this World Wide Web site: http:// www.mcw.edu/bioethics.
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