Article Text
Abstract
Ethicists often struggle to maintain institution-wide awareness of and commitment to medical ethics. At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), we created the Ethics Liaison Program to address that challenge by making ethics part of the moral culture of the institution. Liaisons represent clinical and non-clinical areas throughout the medical centre. The liaison has a four-part role: to spread awareness and understanding of Ethics Programs among their coworkers; share information regarding ethical dilemmas in their work area with the members of the Ethics Support Service; review ethics activities and needs within their area; and undertake ethics-related projects. This paper lists the notable attributes of the Ethics Liaison Program, and describes the purpose and structure of the programme, its advantages and the challenges to implementing it. The Ethics Liaison Program has helped to make ethics part of the everyday culture at BIDMC, and other medical centres might benefit from the establishment of similar programmes.
- Ethics Committees/Consultation
- Clinical Ethics
- Applied and Professional Ethics
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors WM, LF and SON established the Ethics Liaison Program. WM leads the Ethics Liaison Program. SB, WM, AC, SON and LF drafted and revised the paper.
Competing interests None.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Clinical bioethics integration, sustainability, and accountability: the Hub and Spokes Strategy
- The NHS and market forces in healthcare: the need for organisational ethics
- Clinical ethicists’ perspectives on organisational ethics in healthcare organisations
- Ethics support in clinical practice
- Ethics rounds: affecting ethics quality at all organisational levels
- The Concise Argument
- Project Examining Effectiveness in Clinical Ethics (PEECE): phase 1—descriptive analysis of nine clinical ethics services
- Teaching medical ethics: what is the impact of role models? Some experiences from Swedish medical schools
- Evolution of hospital clinical ethics committees in Canada
- Ethics consultation in paediatric and adult emergency departments: an assessment of clinical, ethical, learning and resource needs