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Successes and Failures of Hospital Ethics Committees: A National Survey of Ethics Committee Chairs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2002

GLENN McGEE
Affiliation:
Center for Bioethics of the University of Pennsylvania
JOSHUA P. SPANOGLE
Affiliation:
Stanford Medical School, Stanford, California
ARTHUR L. CAPLAN
Affiliation:
Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh
DINA PENNY
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
DAVID A. ASCH
Affiliation:
Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

In 1992, the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) passed a mandate that all its approved hospitals put in place a means for addressing ethical concerns.Although the particular process the hospital uses to address such concerns—ethics consultant, ethics forum, ethics committee—may vary, the hospital or healthcare ethics committee (HEC) is used most often. In a companion study to that reported here, we found that in 1998 over 90% of U.S. hospitals had ethics committees, compared to just 1% in 1983, and that many have some and a few have sweeping clinical powers in hospitals.

Type
BREAKING BIOETHICS
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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