Descriptive Analysis of the Restructuring of the Ethics Service in an Urban Safety-Net Hospital
Saturday, October 14, 2023
10:30 AM – 11:45 AM ET
Location: Waterview CD (Lobby Level)
This paper presentation will serve to describe and assess considerations taken in the restructuring and growing of an ethics program at a major urban safety-net hospital and level 1 trauma center. To respond to a high volume of complex consultations, the longstanding legacy ethics committee was reconfigured into an ethics consultation service given its historical focus on and expertise in the consideration of individual ethics cases. An administrative-level Ethics Committee was established to take on a more operational function, using aggregated consultation data to respond to trends in consultations, evaluation of consultation quality, and institutional policy development— in effect constituting an organizational ethics committee that shapes and drives the culture and philosophy of ethics within the institution. In addition to an assessment of the perceived strengths and weaknesses observed in competing modalities of ethics service delivery within a hospital, this presentation considers how the unique social situation of the hospital (e.g. patient demographics, county-funding, academic affiliation) and its culture of ethics can affect the appraisal of proposed models of clinical ethics programs in the interest of promoting ethical practice aligned with a health system’s values and mission.
Elizabeth Sivertsen, MBE CCRN HEC-C – Medical Ethicist, Grady Memorial Hospital