Handbook for Health Care Ethics Committees

Hospitals, nursing homes, and home care agencies seeking approval by the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) must have a standing mechanism to address ethical issues. Most organizations have chosen to satisfy this with an interdisciplinary ethics committee. The best of these committees are knowledgeable, creative, and effective resources in their institutions. Many are well meaning but lack the information, experience, and skills to negotiate adequately the complex ethical issues that arise in clinical and organizational settings.

Handbook for Health Care Ethics Committees is the first resource to address the myriad responsibilities that ethics committees have, including education, case consultation, and policy development. Through case studies, the authors explore issues such as informed consent and refusal, decision making and decisional capacity, truth telling, decision-making concerns of minors, end-of-life issues, palliative care, justice in and access to health care services, and organizational ethics.

Featuring an eight-chapter curriculum review and discussion of the ethical foundations of health care practice, sample policies and procedures, draft guidelines, and key legal cases, this handbook will be essential reading for every health care ethics committee member.

Linda Farber Post is a clinical ethicist and educator, formerly at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Jeffrey Blustein is a professor of bioethics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a clinical ethicist at both the Einstein and Moses Divisions of Montefiore Medical Center. Nancy Neveloff Dubler is the director of the Division of Bioethics at Montefiore Medical Center and a professor of epidemiology and population health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.