Medical Ethics Advisor
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New Data on Strategies to Increase Advance Care Planning
Despite ample evidence that advance care planning can benefit patients, families, and healthcare systems, most older adults have not completed it. Many clinicians and researchers are trying to find effective strategies to increase advance planning rates.
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Infrequent Billing for Advance Care Planning Is Ethical Concern
A recent study’s findings show that patients with billed advance care planning encounters had decreased expenditures at the end of life.
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Ethicists Are Facing Complex Medical-Aid-in-Dying Cases
Clinicians face unique ethical questions with medical-aid-in-dying (MAID) cases, and ethicists soon may be seeing more consults involving this issue.
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Ethical Decision-Making for High-Risk Surgical Patients
High-risk patients present some unique ethical considerations for surgeons. One issue is that surgeons are under increasing pressure to meet quality metrics, but high-risk patients are more likely to have adverse outcomes. That can result in lower metrics — and, possibly, less reimbursement.
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Was the Consult Effective? Ethicists Survey Requestors
If ethics programs really want to know how well they are doing, individuals who participated in consults are ideal sources of information. To obtain this valuable feedback, some ethics programs are using surveys.
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Bioethics Field Is Less Diverse, with Different Views, than the General Public
Bioethics is a growing and influential field, yet little is known about bioethicists themselves. “It is important to understand bioethicists’ backgrounds and views because these may shape policies and practices,” says Leah Pierson, PhD, an MD-PhD student at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
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References Used to Support Ethics Recommendations Depend on the Ethicist
What references are ethics consultants actually using to support their recommendations? And are ethics consultants using the same references?
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Ethical Concerns for Study Participants with Opioid Use Disorder
Individuals with opioid use disorder are a vulnerable population who face some unique risks when participating in research.
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Some Hospitals Still Restrict Family Presence
Many hospitals still have not lifted restrictions on family presence during resuscitation/invasive procedures that were implemented during the pandemic, raising ethical concerns. A year out from the end of the global pandemic, it is time for family presence to be reestablished to reflect a culture of patient and family-centered care, according to an updated practice alert from the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses.
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Ethical Concerns if AI Tools Assist Surrogate Decision-Makers
Surrogate decision-makers are faced with a formidable task: To make decisions based on the ethical principle of substituted judgment. “The idea is supposed to be, when these surrogates are making decisions, they are not supposed to choose what they want,” says David Wendler, MA, PhD, head of the section of research ethics in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. The surrogates instead must ask: What decision would the patient make?