Evaluating Ethics Committees: A View from the Outside

Evaluating ethics committees: a view from the outside.

More than 60 percent of hospitals have ethics committees. The wide-scale, voluntary adoption of these committees by hospitals is surprising, given the lack of data on their effectiveness. Little effort has been made to evaluate such committees, in part because of the lack of consensus on their purpose. The argument presented here is that, from a policy perspective, the committees' purpose must ...

Evaluating ethics committees: what do we mean by success?

Ethics committees and ethics consultants

Ethics committee and ethics consultants are among the more interesting phenomena associated with bioethics. Although in some respects both reach back to the ancient origins of medical ethics, in other ways they are reflections of a ‘postmodern’ society that seeks moral resolutions while remaining agnostic about substantive moral absolutes. In the present article I shall describe the history of ...

Committees--a personal view.

Developing clinical ethics committees.

Formal clinical ethics review first developed in the USA and most hospitals there have structures in place. This is often a clinical ethics committee. Developments have been slower in the UK, where there has been uncertainty and variability about the role of clinical ethics committees. Even in the USA, their exact role is uncertain. Although we now have a good idea of the mechanisms for ethical...