The Nurses Healthcare Ethics Committee Handbook

Healthcare ethics help guide and influence the way physicians, nurses, and other members of the healthcare team care for patients and make decisions. Ethics address the moral dilemmas that arise out of conflicts with duties or obligations as well as the consequences of decision-making. As healthcare has continued to grow and evolve, so has the way healthcare ethics are handled. Nurses are uniquely positioned to serve as leaders in healthcare ethics because they are intricately involved in all aspects of patient care, including care coordination, recommendations for plans of care, provision of life-sustaining interventions, and patient education. The Nurse’s Healthcare Ethics Committee Handbook focuses on a nurse-led ethics consultative service. Authors Angeline Dewey and Andrea Holecek provide tools that nursing students, professionals, administrators, and other members of the healthcare team need to develop infrastructure and processes that support nurses in an ethics committee leadership role. Filled with real-life scenarios, this book outlines a step-by-step process for nurses to evaluate ethical cases and the risks involved

How can dedicated ethics committees members fulfill their complex roles as moral analysts, policy reviewers, and clinical consultants? The Joint Commission (TJC) accredits and certifies more than 19,000 health care organizations in the United States, including hospitals, nursing homes, and home care agencies. Each organization must have a standing health care ethics committee to maintain its status. These interdisciplinary committees are composed of physicians, nurses, attorneys, ethicists, administrators, and interested citizens. Their main function is to review and provide resolutions for specific, individual patient care problems. Many of these committees are well meaning but may lack the information, experience, skills, and formal background in bioethics needed to adequately negotiate the complex ethical issues that arise in clinical and organizational settings. Handbook for Health Care Ethics Committees was the first book of its kind to address the myriad responsibilities faced by ethics committees, including education, case consultation, and policy development. Adopting an accessible tone and using a case study format, the authors explore serious issues involving informed consent and refusal, decision making and decisional capacity, truth telling, the end of life, palliative care, justice in and access to health care services, and organizational ethics. The authors have thoroughly updated the content and expanded their focus in the second edition to include ethics committees in other clinical settings, such as long-term care facilities, small community hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and hospices. They have added three new chapters that address reproduction, disability, and the special needs of the elder population, and they provide additional specialized policies and procedures on the book’s website. This guide is an essential resource for all health care ethics committee members.

How can dedicated health care ethics committees increase their effectiveness and demonstrate their value as essential moral resources for their organizations? Among the most effective and increasingly valued resources in the health care decision-making process is the institutional ethics committee. The Joint Commission (TJC) accredits and certifies more than 19,000 health care organizations in the United States, including hospitals, nursing homes, and home care agencies. As a condition of accreditation, TJC requires health care organizations to have available a standing multidisciplinary ethics committee, composed of physicians, nurses, attorneys, ethicists, administrators, and interested lay citizens. Many of these committees are well meaning but may lack the information, experience, skills, and formal background in bioethics needed to effectively address the range and complexity of the ethical issues that arise in clinical and organizational settings. Handbook for Health Care Ethics Committees was conceived in 2007 to address the myriad responsibilities assumed by ethics committees. Using sample cases and accessible language, Linda Farber Post and Jeffrey Blustein explored applied bioethics, including informed consent and refusal, decision making and decisional capacity, truth telling, care at the beginning and end of life, palliation, justice in and access to health care services, and organizational ethics. In the third edition, Post and Blustein have thoroughly updated and reorganized the content and expanded the scope of the material, with special attention to changes in the health care landscape since the second edition was published in 2015. They also focus on communication between and among patients, care providers, and families, the demands of professionalism, the essential role that ethics committees can and should play, and how their effectiveness and value can be assessed. An entirely new chapter examines research ethics. The book also addresses the challenging ethical issues raised by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This guide remains an essential resource for all health care ethics committee and their members.

This handbook provides tools for nurse educators, ethics educators, practicing nurses and allied health professionals for developing confidence and skill in ethical decision making in interdisciplinary settings such as acute and chronic care hospitals and clinics. It is useful for all healthcare personnel who face ethical issues in the course of their work and who work with nurses to resolve these issues. While the content is based on a US context, the concerns of nurses internationally are discussed and emphasized. Nurses working in acute and chronic care settings face many obstacles to providing good care and are often the first line of defense related to patient safety and meeting the needs of patients and their families. Some of the obstacles to optimal patient care are institutional, some sociocultural, and others the result of inadequate communication. Evidence points to the idea that while nurses do have the knowledge and skills to address practice problems of various sorts, they may not be confident in their skills of ethical decision making and advocacy actions. This is a resource to develop moral agency on behalf of individuals and to address broader barriers to good care raised at the local, community, or social levels.

Approximately 85% of hospitals now have ethics committees. But this statistic says little about the efficiency and importance of these committees in their institutions. Frequently, ethics committees exist more in name than in practice, and are left without the guidance and help of their institution. Health Care Ethics Committees provides a plethora of advice, including possible projects and activities, suggestions for making meetings more effective, insights into policy-making, and models for mission statements and goals. In addition, this book gives leaders a panoramic view of the past, present, and future of ethics committees in health care.

Definitive and comprehensive guidance for members of healthcare ethics committees confronted with ethically challenging situations.

"This book focuses in an in-depth way on the particular problems faced by nurses in various advanced practice roles across the life-span and in front-line care. It is comprehensive textbook broken out into three sections: philosophical foundation, ethics, and specialty focus"--