Hospital Ethics Teams Raise Concerns

On June 25 The Wall Street Journal published an article about the increase of ethics consulting services at hospitals and the qualifications of those professionals to deal with care issues at the end of life.

. . . The complex ethical issues arising from new life-prolonging medical technologies are throwing up new challenges. And hospitals face potential legal liability if patients and families feel they haven't been properly counseled or provided with all the information they need to make decisions.

"Hospitals would never permit staff to engage in medical procedures for which they are untutored, untrained and unsupervised, but there are less-than-qualified persons intervening in serious ways in the lives of patients and families" on medical ethical issues, says Nancy Dubler, director of the bioethics program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y.

The article was discussed on the Quality of Life Care blog, which offered a different solution to assist families dealing with these difficult decisions - call your local hospice. Deanna Cochran, RN, BA, CHPN writes:

The article discusses how ethical committees and consultants in hospitals are being criticized for not being trained enough to talk with families regarding end of life issues. When I read this article, what I thought about is that hospice team members have these talks daily in their practice as a matter of course. We are part of family meetings where all kinds of difficult and emotional topics are discussed.

I’m not a trained ethicist or counselor. Neither are hospice nurses, doctors, social workers or chaplains who deal in this level of care daily. What we do know is end of life issues and how the body works at the end of life and we do have the time to talk about all of it. Time to educate is built into the system of palliative care.