Medical Ethics Advisor – May 1, 2024
May 1, 2024
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Demand for Pediatric Ethics Consults Is Increasing
As a long-term member of the ethics committee at Akron Children’s Hospital, Julie M. Aultman, PhD, noticed a shift in the types of consultations in which ethicists were engaged. Consults involved a wide range of issues, from end-of-life care to organizational ethics. Overall, cases were becoming more complex.
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Unique Ethical Concerns if Research Involves the Recently Deceased
Research on recently deceased humans is important to conduct, but there are many challenging ethical considerations.
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Clinicians Report Challenges with Goals of Care Discussions
As a clinician caring for patients with chronic critical illness, Sarah Andersen, MD, MS, observed that achieving meaningful goals of care decisions seemed to be more challenging than for other patients. “One of the challenges is that patients with chronic critical illness are often too sick to express their values and participate in decisions,” she says.
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Many Ethics Consults Involve Questions on Life-Sustaining Treatment
How are you going to justify the decision? This is the question Thomas D. Harter, PhD, asks intensive care unit (ICU) clinicians who are struggling with whether to continue or withdraw life-sustaining treatment.
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Telesurgery Poses Unique Ethical Considerations
The cutting-edge field of telesurgery holds promise for improved patient outcomes, but there also are significant ethical considerations.
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Strategies to Get Medical Students and Trainees in the Ethics ‘Pipeline’
Many medical schools offer electives or pathways that allow medical students to develop knowledge and skills in bioethics. “These are largely designed to create ethically competent clinicians, perhaps those that can provide ethical leadership within an institution. But I am actually not aware of many MD programs that are aiming to train future clinical ethicists,” says Janet Malek, PhD, an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy.
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Emerging Ethical Issues with Chronic Pain Care
The integration of telemedicine and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the specialty of pain medicine poses some unique ethical challenges, according to a recent paper.
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Ethical Guidance if Clinicians Use Tests to Search for Covert Consciousness
Clinical professional society guidelines in America and Europe now recommend the use of advanced tests (such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalogram) to search for covert consciousness in some patients who appear behaviorally unresponsive at the bedside after severe brain injury.
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Egregious Ethics Violations Require Involvement of State Medical Boards
Ethicists address a wide array of ethical issues in the hospital setting, ranging from conflicts among clinical team members and concerns about potentially inappropriate end-of-life care. But what if a nurse or clinician reports that a physician has committed serious wrongdoing?
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Ethical Informed Consent Is Challenge in NICU
Informed consent is rooted in the ethical principles of patient autonomy and shared decision-making. Suboptimal consenting practices can jeopardize patient autonomy.
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Nursing Leaders Need Ethicists’ Help with Moral Distress
As an early career nurse in 2020, Preston H. Miller, PhD, RN, CCRN-CMC, PCCN, CFRN, experienced the many effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on nursing practice and healthcare in general. Miller conducted a formal literature review and found that what literature did exist was qualitative in nature. “The findings of this review revealed a lack of research on moral distress among unit-based critical care nurse leaders,” says Miller.