Medical Ethics
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Ethicists View HEC-C as One Step Toward Professionalization
The demand for ethics work is rising, but most individuals who conduct consults are clinicians who work as volunteers. Leaders must identify and address all kinds of ethical issues, which requires employing the right people with relevant and specific knowledge and skills.
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Task Force Aims to Grow HEC-C Program
The Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified (HEC-C) designation is advancing the overall professionalization of the field of ethics. The certification advances the quality of ethics consultations and puts ethicists on a level playing field with clinical counterparts.
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Tips for Making ‘Tele-Ethics’ Work
Even after the pandemic, medical facilities continue leveraging virtual health technology.
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Feds Weigh In on Psychedelic Medicine Clinical Trials
FDA issues draft guidance for researchers studying alternative therapies.
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Many Seriously Ill Older Adults Lack Documented Goals-of-Care Discussions
Benign nudges may advance those discussions. These conversations do not need to be lengthy. A few short inquiries asked by a respectful, attentive provider is all that is needed to help many patients share concerns and preferences for care.
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Ethicists Debate Withdrawing ECMO Over Patient’s Objections
The commonly used ethical justifications for unilateral withdrawal over the objection of a patient with decision-making capacity are problematic. The ethicists’ task is to help stakeholders examine the underlying assumptions in light of the available empirical evidence or potential counterarguments.
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Ethics Consults Depend on Ability to Absorb Multiple Viewpoints
An important role for the ethicist is to clarify the values people hold that inform their decision-making. Thus, ethicists must develop skills that encourage patients, families, or surrogates to openly express these values. But these skills do not always come naturally.
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Sham Surgeries: Should Researchers Offer the Real Procedure After the Trial?
There are legitimate concerns when investigators conduct sham-controlled trials. Researchers need a way to effectively determine if the surgery works, but designing this kind of ethically sound and efficacious clinical trial is difficult.
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Researchers Often Exclude Adults Living with Intellectual Disabilities
Historically, adults living with intellectual disabilities have not been considered among potential participants in the recruitment phase of studies, or have been presumed to lack capacity for first-person consent and excluded on that basis. While there is a contemporary trend toward greater inclusion, these barriers to research participation remain important concerns.
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Ethical Approach to Informed Consent for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities
The criteria to demonstrate sufficient capacity to consent should be flexible — and proportional to the complexity and risks of each individual study. Researchers must consider individual differences and be prepared to use a variety of methods.