Medical Ethics
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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.
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Making More Protected Time for Clinical Ethics Work
To make a good case for investing in protected time, ethicists can engage with department heads to identify the unmet needs of healthcare providers. Testimonials from providers who have benefitted from ethics consultation demonstrate direct benefit to patient care.
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Ethical Problems with Rural Cancer Patients’ Access to Care
Patients and clinicians should discuss any available data regarding differences in care delivered at potential treatment sites, potential accompanying outcomes differences, and the costs and benefits of pursuing treatment at each site. Rural patient navigators should be involved in this discussion, considering the complexity of care coordination for patients with cancer.
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Remote Mental Healthcare Facing Ethical, Legal Pushback
Patients might assume they are talking with a licensed therapist, when they actually are speaking with an unlicensed therapist or a mental health coach. That is an ethical violation.
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Physicians Should Educate Patients About Cannabis-Impaired Driving
Primary care providers should discuss frequency of use, dosage, tolerance levels, and withdrawal symptoms. Also, inform patients of the harms, risks, and legal consequences of cannabis-impaired driving.
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Is Ethics Education Part of the Solution to the Nursing Shortage?
Armed with ethics expertise, nursing leaders can help frontline nurses avoid burnout and moral distress. Consider routinely hosting short meetings to discuss ethical problems that are arising before things reach a crisis level.
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Ethical Responses if Family Abandons Loved One at Hospital
By leveraging their mediation skills, ethicists can build trust between weary family caregivers and clinicians who are unsure about how to handle a delicate situation. This can help everyone identify patient needs and find possible solutions.
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Surrogates View Their Role Differently Than Clinicians
Surrogates view their role as speaking on behalf of the patient; clinicians view the surrogate’s role as speaking as if the patient was in the room advocating for themselves. The problem arises when the surrogate does not voice the opinions of the patient, instead voicing their own opinion of the situation.