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Hospital ethics committees need to review their hospitals' policies and approach to medical error reporting to determine whether or not the approach is a principled one, an expert says.
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Take a critical look at the dynamics of the ethics consult meeting in a debriefing, as a way to improve the process, an expert suggests.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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President Obama's administration reversed its decision to revise a Medicare regulation to include paying physicians to discuss good advance care planning with patients.
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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.
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As hospitals add more palliative care services, ethical issues arise that sometimes cannot be handled solely by a hospital ethics board because a broader community perspective is necessary.
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Palliative care once was a rare treatment option in the hospital setting, but in recent years it has grown in popularity to the point that most major hospitals and many small-to-mid-sized hospitals have palliative care programs available for patients, an expert says.
