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Ethics Committees: Group Process Concerns and the Need for Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

Gregory J. Hayes
Gregory J. Hayes
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor and Chairman of the Department of Health Sciences, University of Nevada, Reno, and Assistant Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Nevada School of Medicine
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Extract

Few ethics committees were in place when the New Jersey Supreme Court announced its ruling on the Quinlan case in 1976. Today, the vast majority of hospitals have formed ethics committees and their use in nursing homes and other healthcare facilities is growing. Given the increasing commitment to the use of ethics committees and their increasing influence on healthcare decision making, the careful evaluation of committee performance should be a high priority. Yet to date ethics committees appear to have undergone relatively little scrutiny. While professional articles on ethics committees do appear and at least one journal (CQ) sets aside a regular section for the discussion of “Ethics Committees at Work” articles to date have primarily been limited to essays, philosophical inquiries, reports, case studies, and, occasionally, surveys. The use of more structured research methodologies has been lacking. As a result, it is not yet clear, for example, what characteristics describe the best functioning ethics committee. Indeed, what constitutes best functioning lacks careful definition as well. Committee impact on medical decision making and patient outcomes, while discussed, has not been systematically measured and analyzed.

Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , Winter 1995 , pp. 83 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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