Medical Ethics
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Intervention Reduces Distress of Surrogates
Being a surrogate decisionmaker in the intensive care unit (ICU) can have long-term psychological consequences, including post-traumatic stress.
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Timing of Ethics Consults Varies by Diagnosis, Language, and Ethnicity
Farshid Dayyani, MD, PhD, joined the ethics committee at University of California Irvine (UCI) Medical Center in 2020. Then, the pandemic hit. Dayyani and colleagues wanted to know if patient characteristics (language, diagnosis, and race/ethnicity) affected the timing of ethics consult requests or the ethics team’s recommendations. There were limited data showing some racial and gender disparities in delays to obtaining ethics consults. The researchers saw the need for a more comprehensive analysis of ethics consults.
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Are Ethics Committees Effective? Some Are Being Replaced with Alternative Model
The vast majority of hospitals have ethics committees. Yet these committees vary in terms of their effectiveness, leading some ethicists to conclude it is time for a new approach.
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Nursing Leaders Need Ethicists’ Help with Moral Distress
As an early career nurse in 2020, Preston H. Miller, PhD, RN, CCRN-CMC, PCCN, CFRN, experienced the many effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on nursing practice and healthcare in general. Miller conducted a formal literature review and found that what literature did exist was qualitative in nature. “The findings of this review revealed a lack of research on moral distress among unit-based critical care nurse leaders,” says Miller.
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Ethical Informed Consent Is Challenge in NICU
Informed consent is rooted in the ethical principles of patient autonomy and shared decision-making. Suboptimal consenting practices can jeopardize patient autonomy.
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Egregious Ethics Violations Require Involvement of State Medical Boards
Ethicists address a wide array of ethical issues in the hospital setting, ranging from conflicts among clinical team members and concerns about potentially inappropriate end-of-life care. But what if a nurse or clinician reports that a physician has committed serious wrongdoing?
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Ethical Guidance if Clinicians Use Tests to Search for Covert Consciousness
Clinical professional society guidelines in America and Europe now recommend the use of advanced tests (such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalogram) to search for covert consciousness in some patients who appear behaviorally unresponsive at the bedside after severe brain injury.
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Emerging Ethical Issues with Chronic Pain Care
The integration of telemedicine and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the specialty of pain medicine poses some unique ethical challenges, according to a recent paper.
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Strategies to Get Medical Students and Trainees in the Ethics ‘Pipeline’
Many medical schools offer electives or pathways that allow medical students to develop knowledge and skills in bioethics. “These are largely designed to create ethically competent clinicians, perhaps those that can provide ethical leadership within an institution. But I am actually not aware of many MD programs that are aiming to train future clinical ethicists,” says Janet Malek, PhD, an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy.
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Telesurgery Poses Unique Ethical Considerations
The cutting-edge field of telesurgery holds promise for improved patient outcomes, but there also are significant ethical considerations.