ETHICS COMMITTEE

Mission Statement

Patients, families, surrogates and providers are faced with difficult decisions in health care today. Many of these decisions, in addition to having medical, nursing, legal, psychological, religious, and social service dimensions, are value laden and, as such, raise value conflicts or uncertainties. In recognition of this, The MetroHealth System has established the Medical Ethics Committee whose mission is to assist those involved with difficult clinical decision making in sorting through the ethical aspects of those decisions.

Ethics Committee Members

Name	Department
Mark Aulisio, PhD	Research/Ethics
Marcia Bailey, MSN	Surgery/Dir. Nursing Service
Craig Bates, MD	Emergency Medicine
Alfred Connors, MD	CMO/Administration
Nicole Deming, JD, MA	Research/Ethics
Irene Dietz, MD	Pediatrics
Elise Ellick, MA	Pediatrics
Jason Gatliff, PhD	Research/Ethics
Michael Harrington, MD	Medicine/Palliative Care
Brendan Hawthorn, MD	Emergency Medicine
Amer Khiyami, MD	Pathology
Mark Lehman, LISW-S	Social Work
Cheryl Malleo, RN	Nursing Central Support
Elizabeth O’Toole, MD	Medicine/Palliative Care
Rachel Phetteplace, MSSA, MA, LSW	Research/Ethics
Diane Roberts, LISW-S	Social Work
Dan Rossbach, M-DIV	Pastoral Care
Kathryn Schill, JD	Community

 

Ethics Committee Education and Advocacy

Each year the Ethics Committee identifies a theme for educational outreach to the broader hospital community based on the ethics consult requests of the previous year.  For 2009, the theme focused on health professionals caring for family members or significant others in the hospital in their professional role.  A subcommittee was convened to study the issue, develop an educational presentation, and propose institutional policy.  Nursing was a particular focus for this outreach given the lack of guidance from the State Board of Nursing and the American Nurses Association on this matter. 

For 2010, the theme focused on the problematic concept of medical futility.  A subcommittee developed a presentation on medical futility that included area-specific case vignettes which allowed the presentation to be tailored for each area/discipline in the hospital. Presentations were offered in a number of departments in the first half of 2010 and will continue through-out 2010.  This one-hour presentation was developed to discuss the meaning of futility and why futility is a problem. The presentation included an overview of futility, practical ways futility can be addressed, tools for communicating with patients, staff and families, and allowed time for working through futility case examples identified by the audience. 

In preparation for Fall of 2011, members of the Medical Ethics Committee are developing a presentation entitled, The Limits and Role of Surrogates. This presentation is intended to help health care professionals assess patient decision-making capacity and understand the role of the patient surrogate for patients without capacity. The presentation addresses the components capacity, substitutive judgment and best interest standards and describes the limits and role of surrogate decision makers.  Case vignettes will be used to exemplify and clarify these limits and roles This presentation can be adapted with department-specific cases and presented to a variety of audiences.