Medical Ethics Advisor
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Bias and Stigma Hinder Effective Obesity Treatment
The industry is moving away from a hierarchy of care where a primary provider tells the patient what they ought to do. Instead, the model is moving toward shared decision-making.
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Researchers Offer Tips to Improve Shared Decision-Making in Pediatrics
Sometimes, all that is communicated to parents was the physician’s recommendation of what to do, not that there were several options to choose from and why one particular option is what the clinician preferred. This suggests physicians could benefit from additional guidance to promote the appropriate use of shared decision-making.
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Research Ethics Consultation Service Is a Growing and Evolving Program
After a decade in existence, the most frequent reason for requesting these services is questions about study design, followed by informed consent.
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More Transparency Might Bolster Trust in FDA Advisory Committees
The FDA does not always convene an advisory committee meeting in connection with application reviews, but may do so when questions related to safety or the data submitted to support approval arise. In the modern environment, some believe if they cannot see it, foul play must be afoot. Some of that could be allayed by transparency and more public education.
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Out of Options: When Parents Abandon Pediatric Psychiatric Patients at Hospital
Parents often are faced with an impossible choice. They must decide whether to bring home a child who poses a threat to self and others, or risk a child abandonment charge. The criteria for acute psychiatric hospitalization are so high that children might be discharged only to be rehospitalized within weeks or days — and retraumatized in the process.
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How to Respond to a Consult Request for ‘Difficult’ Family
Clinicians sometimes overlook the fact there are many contributing factors when a patient or family member displays “difficult” behavior. Ethicists can help clinicians parse those, recognize their own internal biases, and think about the family’s perspective.
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Ethicists Can Intervene if Patient/Physician Relationship Is Beyond Repair
It is important to remember that if serious conflict with a patient arises, clinicians should not act in a knee-jerk way. A primary care practitioner might use ethics practice guidelines to create a consistent approach for dealing with these cases.
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Physicians’ Well-Being Top Ethics Issue
Ethicists should encourage their organizations to survey physicians to identify which factors are adversely affecting well-being. Meaningful change cannot occur without actively engaging physicians in determining what changes they believe will significantly improve their health and well-being.
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Efforts Underway to Diversify Clinical Ethics Field
Success depends on available ethics resources and overall organizational diversity. Broader changes to the ethics field resulting in more diversity would require regulatory, legal, or accreditation oversight. Absent that, it is going to be one institution at a time, or one or several ethicists at a time, trying to create the right kind of mix of diversity and representation.
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Should Ethicists Hide Consult Notes from Patients?
Ethics consults often are accompanied by conflict, intense emotions, sensitive or controversial topics, and disagreements about values. Ethics notes tend to incorporate more narrative and explicit analysis than other clinical notes. For the sake of transparency, instead of shielding notes, consider excluding details that are likely to cause harm.