Medical Ethics
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How Is the Ethics Service Doing? Data Are Necessary to Know
Unlike clinical areas, which are required to track a large number of healthcare quality measures, many ethics programs have little data to demonstrate their effectiveness. One reason is that assessing an ethics consult is not as straightforward as tracking the rate of hospital-acquired infections or surgical complications.
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Effective Ethics Education in Nurse Residency Programs
While directing the nurse residency program at a large midwestern academic teaching hospital, Rebecca West, MSN, RN, NPD-BC, observed that many recent graduates were highly distressed over ethical issues. One new nurse was intensely uncomfortable with completing orders for aggressive treatment for a patient clearly in the process of dying. The nurse did not think to request an ethics consultation. West and colleagues authored a recent paper on the benefits of embedding ethics content in nurse residency programs.
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Some Patients Request Ethics Consults — but for Issues Unrelated to Ethics
At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, ethicists added a “Request Ethics Consultation” button to the electronic patient portal. However, of 74 ethics consult requests made through the portal, just one involved an ethics issue. All of the other requests fell outside the purview of the Ethics Consultation Service, such as people wanting help with hospital resources or care coordination.
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Can Ethicists Be Sued for Recommendations? Attorneys Warn of Potential Legal Risks
The field of clinical ethics continues to evolve, with core competencies, certification, and documentation in the electronic medical record. In a recent paper, Claudia R. Sotomayor, MD, DBe, HEC-C, chief of the Ethics Consultation Service and a clinical ethicist at Georgetown University’s Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics in Washington, DC, and colleagues explored whether the professionalization of ethics consultation exposes those working in this field to the types of liability claims faced by professionals in other fields.
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Ethical Obligations if Patients Have Limited English Proficiency
As a nurse and clinical bioethicist, Melissa Kurtz Uveges, PhD, MA, RN, had a strong desire to facilitate communication with patients with Limited English Proficiency and to provide information in their preferred language.
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Electronic Order Set Facilitates Treatment Withdrawal
At OhioHealth, an electronic order set is used to facilitate withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment.
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Most Financial Conflicts of Radiology Guideline Authors Are Undisclosed
Even though the federal Physician Payments Sunshine Act was enacted more than a decade ago, misconceptions persist as to its requirements.
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Unique Ethical Concerns with Informed Consent for Psychedelics
The use of psychedelics in psychiatric care raises multiple challenging ethical issues.
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Ethics Concerns if Patient Currently Is (or Previously Was) Incarcerated
Unique ethical issues come up with individuals who currently are (or previously were) incarcerated or whose surrogate decisionmaker is incarcerated, a recent study found.
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Ethical End-of-Life Care Discussions in ICUs
Intensive care unit clinicians experience multiple barriers to quality end-of-life care conversations, a recent study found.