To prevent hospital admissions, gather as much information as possible about the patient's discharge needs, psycho-social needs, and support systems in the community, Cory Sevin, RN, MSN, NP, director with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement advises. Talk to family members and primary care providers who know the patient and can provide first-hand information, Sevin says.
Hospital ethics boards now can refer to national guidelines when developing procedural standards and processes for evaluating quality of ethics consultations (EC) and institutional EC processes.
Hospital ethics committees sometimes are called to handle cases involving donation after cardiac death (DCD), but handling these cases can be a challenge, an expert says.
Hospitals might improve their ethics consultation processes if they design and use a brief ethics family assessment tool to determine families' and patients' values, two ethicists say.
Hospital ethics boards seeking a solution for efficiently and effectively documenting and assessing ethics consultation work could find a best practice in the ethics consultation web (ECWeb) program developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in Washington, DC, experts say.
