Clinical and Organizational Ethics
The Clinical and Organizational Ethics domain educates and empowers healthcare professionals and their institutions, advocates for patients' rights, trains ethics committees, and supports healthcare ethics scholarship and leadership.
This domain sponsors the Kansas City Regional Ethics Committee Consortium, the nation’s oldest alliance of healthcare ethics committees. The Consortium has a rich history of ethics committee education, research, and development of policy guidelines for difficult issues such as withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatments, recommendations regarding advance directives, ethical issues in managed care, and determining decisional incapacity.
This domain also hosts an online discussion group for institutional members across the country to discuss diverse themes including controversial topics, policy issues, and current biomedical events.
Links:
Improving Ethics Quality in Healthcare
IntegratedEthics is a proactive approach by the Veterans Administration to improve ethics consultations in its hospitals. George Flanagan D.Min., M.A., IntegratedEthics Program Officer at the Kansas City VA Hospital, explained the approach to the Kansas City Regional Hospital Ethics Committee Consortium on March 5, 2009.
Link: PowerPoint, IntegratedEthics: A Program of the Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for Healthcare Ethics
Futility and Moral Distress
John Lantos, MD
October 30, 2008
In this Grand Rounds presentation at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, MO, Dr. Lantos examines a number of controversial cases, their ethical implications, and how medical professionals must talk about futile cases.
The Center and Hospital Ethics Committees
YouTube Video
July 3, 2008
The Center for Practical Bioethics has developed and trained hospital ethics committees for more than 20 years. This video provides the history and the model that has been very successful in addressing difficult choices in our medical institutions.
New Jersey Funeral Directors Resolution
Regarding Organ and Tissue Donation
Funeral homes should not function as recovery sites for organ and tissue recovery except upon the request of families to accommodate the recovery of research specimens for legitimate research projects and for cornea recovery by members of the Eye Bank Association of America.
That’s according to a resolution passed by the New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association. The Center for Practical Bioethics provided assistance in development of the resolution. For more, click here.
