Guidance for healthcare ethics committees / edited by D. Micah Hester and Toby L. Schonfeld.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Section 1. The context of healthcare ethics committee work -- Introduction -- Brief introduction to ethics and ethical theory -- Healthcare ethics committees and the law -- Understanding and addressing health disparities through a racial paradigm -- Cultural and religious issues in health care -- Moral distress -- Section 2. Consultation -- Ethics consultation mission, vision, goals, and process -- A method of consultation -- Informed consent -- Confidentiality and privacy -- Decision-making capacity -- Discharge challenges -- Surrogate decision-making -- Advance care planning and end-of-life decision-making -- Potentially inappropriate treatment and medical futility -- Cognitive dissonance and the care of patients with disorders of consciousness -- Ethical issues in reproduction -- Ethical issues in neonatology -- Ethical issues in pediatrics -- Neuroethics -- Ethical issues in clinical genetics -- Challenging issues in surgical ethics -- Psychiatric ethics -- Section 3. Policy development and organizational issues -- Conscientious objection -- Ethics committees and distributive justice -- Developing and implementing effective ethics policy -- Ethics in and for the organization -- The healthcare ethics committee as educator -- Understanding ethics pedagogy -- Quality assessment of healthcare ethics committees.

"In 1992, The Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation (The Joint Commission) began requiring every accredited hospital to have a mechanism to handle ethical concerns within its institution. In response to this (and other cultural forces in medicine), hospitals across America have come to satisfy the requirement by constituting an institutional Healthcare Ethics Committee (HEC)1. Physicians, nurses, administrators, social workers, chaplains, community volunteers and others populate these committees. Yet by their own admission, many of these individuals, while well intentioned and personally invested, have neither training in ethics nor have the tools at their disposal to aid in their ethical considerations. Even more basically, many members of an HEC, not to mention a healthcare institution writ-large, are comfortable explaining what constitutes an ethical consideration. So, while these individuals are the people both medical professionals and patients turn to for ethical insight into the complexities of medical decision-making, they themselves recognize that they are often underprepared to handle the depth and complexity of many moral2 problems raised by health care"-- Provided by publisher.