Medical Ethics Advisor – September 1, 2024

Many Ethics Committees Lack Formal Process for Education, Orientation

One of the primary functions of an ethics committee is education — for members, for clinicians, and for patients and their family members. Yet most ethics committees have no formal orientation process, and many have no ongoing ethics education process, according to a recent survey of hospital leaders at AdventHealth.

Mental Health Issues Are Coming Up During Ethics Consults

Mental health issues are coming up more frequently during ethics consults, according to ethicists interviewed by Medical Ethics Advisor.

Recent Cases Add to Complexity of Treatment Withdrawal Decision-Making

Many ethics consults involve conflicts over withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment. If patients’ families are aware of recent cases demonstrating recovery potential in patients with traumatic brain injury who were thought to have a low chance of survival, it can make the decision-making process even more challenging.

Ethicists Are Addressing Ableism in Medical Education, Clinical Practice

There is increasing attention to the issue of ableism in healthcare. One concern is that medical education is not doing enough to include the perspectives of people with disabilities.

Ethical Concerns with Portable MRIs in Research

New portable magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies are being developed, allowing study investigators to conduct field-based research in remote settings. The introduction of portable MRI technologies means that new users, some with less experience with MRI research, are using MRI in new locations. There also is increased variation in image resolution. All those factors raise concerns about researchers’ ability to maintain quality control.

QI Initiative Increases Goals of Care Conversations

Many hospitalized patients lack goals of care conversations, causing ethical conflicts at the end of life.

Ethical Approaches to Obtain High-Quality Crowdsourced Data

Researchers increasingly are using online recruitment (“crowdsourcing”) for studies. Rather than relying on undergraduate panels, such as college freshmen completing studies for credit, or basic convenience sampling using social media posts or flyers in classrooms, platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Prolific allow researchers to post their studies as “jobs” for online workers to complete.

Physicians May Have Ethical Obligation to Inform Patients if AI Tool Is Used

Did a physician factor in the recommendations of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool when ruling out a diagnosis or deciding whether to order a diagnostic test? If so, the clinician may wonder whether there is an ethical obligation to tell the patient.

Physicians Posting About Devices May Have Undisclosed Financial Conflicts

Most physicians who mention specific devices or companies in social media posts have undisclosed financial conflicts, a recent study found.

Anesthesiologists Encounter Unique Ethical Issues

There currently is no standardized ethics curriculum for anesthesiology training programs in the United States. Thus, the ethics education trainees receive varies depending on the institution.