Medical Ethics Advisor – April 1, 2011
April 1, 2011
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Revised consultation guidelines offer models for improving quality
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. -
Web-based ethics consult serves as best practice
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. -
CMS reverses plans for advance care planning
President Obama's administration reversed its decision to revise a Medicare regulation to include paying physicians to discuss good advance care planning with patients. -
Conducting donation after cardiac death
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. -
View the term 'futility' through different context
Hospital ethics committees could clarify and improve the way they handle issues involving life support in the intensive care unit (ICU) if they brought more nuance to any definition of the word "futile," an expert says. -
Family assessment tool expands ethics consults
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.