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Facilitating Medical Ethics Case Review: What Ethics Committees Can Learn from Mediation and Facilitation Techniques

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

Mary Beth West  and
Joan McIver Gibson
Mary Beth West
Affiliation:
Visiting Professor of Law, University of New Mexico School of Law
Joan McIver Gibson
Affiliation:
Senior Program Director for the Center for Health Law and Ethics, and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Bioethics at the University of New Mexico's Schools of Law and Medicine
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Extract

Medical ethics committees are increasingly called on to assist doctors, patients, and families in resolving difficult ethics issues. Although committees are becoming more sophisticated in the substance of medical ethics, little attention has been given to the processes these committees use to facilitate decision-making. In 1990, the National Institute for Dispute Resolution in Washington, D.C., provided a planning grant from its Innovation Fund to the Institute of Public Law of the University of New Mexico School of Law to look at what ethics committees can learn from facilitation and mediation techniques. The study's thesis was that, if adapted for use by medical ethics committees, facilitation and mediation techniques can be helpful to those bodies in case review consultations and in other internal committee processes. This article reports on that project.

Type
Special Articles
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , Winter 1992 , pp. 63 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

Notes

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