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Barriers to Ethical Informed Consent with Hereditary Cancer Genetic Testing
Demand for hereditary cancer genetic testing is increasing rapidly as the result of advancements in technology and growing awareness of the utility of testing in cancer prevention and treatment. Clinicians have an ethical responsibility to ensure patients can make a fully informed decision about undergoing genetic testing.
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Ethicists Offer Unique Skills to Address Workplace Violence
For hospitals attempting to address workplace violence, the focus typically is on concrete interventions: Providing de-escalation training, adding metal detectors, or bolstering security. What is less well-understood are the ethical implications of violence.
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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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Study Shows that Family Planning Needs of Hispanics Vary According to Acculturation
New research of Hispanic women surveyed at a public hospital in a New York City suburb shows that a large proportion — nearly three in five — were unaware of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.
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Study Suggests Need for Update in LARC Counseling About Acne
Investigators evaluated adolescent and young adult study participants seeking progestin-only long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) and found there was a risk of the contraceptive worsening acne.
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Study: Small Decrease in Applicants to OB/GYN Residency Programs in Abortion-Ban States
Researchers looked at the impact of the overturn of Roe v. Wade on OB/GYN residency programs in the first year after the U.S. Supreme Court gave states the power to pass abortion bans with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. They found there was a small but significant decrease in the number of applications to states with stricter abortion laws from 2022 to 2023.
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What Did Supreme Court Justices Say About EMTALA and Abortion?
By the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide on whether Idaho and other states can require hospitals — through criminal laws — to turn away pregnant women experiencing a major health crisis when the best treatment for them is an abortion to end their pregnancy. Idaho presented a case that their state law preempts the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), and the federal government argued that EMTALA and the mission of protecting patients’ health and lives takes precedence.