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About Ethics
Bioethics Consultation Service helps answer the tough questions

About Ethics

Patients and families often deal with difficult issues while in the hospital and need guidance to make the best decisions for their situations. Getting answers to ethical questions will be streamlined in 2009 as the Bioethics Consultation Service shifts to a permanent team of on-call bioethicists.

The Bioethics Consultation Service is available for clinicians to page someone for a quick response to ethical questions—from end-of-life care to organ donation issues—that are not easily resolved by medical staff.

Members of the Health System’s adult and pediatric ethics committees, who convene to discuss ethics issues, have rotated the responsibility of handling those questions. Now a handful of staff will be named as principal on-call bioethicists responsible for teaching and Grand Rounds. It builds on the current service and is expected to create timely completion of consults, provide greater uniformity in ethics consultation and enable staff to call someone they are familiar with if an ethics question arises.

“We hope to create a stronger presence of the bioethics consult service that builds on the current program,” says Andrew Barnosky, D.O., associate professor of Emergency Medicine and director of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Service.

Ethics questions can arise daily and in any field, such as orthopedics, oncology, plastic surgery or obstetrics.

One of the most common dilemmas involves a family at odds with how best to care for a loved one with a debilitating and terminal illness who is monitored by technology, but is not getting better and has no advance directive. It can be a painful process for families to decide what to do next, and no less so for medical staff who may also be conflicted. Bioethicists face a tender balance of weighing what’s known about how diseases progress and a family’s values, Barnosky says.

“The presence of a full-time ethicist is a phenomenon, like palliative care, that’s growing in health care,” he says. “It’s grown in the past 25 years and continues to evolve based on needs and expectations of patients to be involved in their care.” - SK

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