Palliative Care: The Ethics Connection
In recent years, two new specialties have entered the care of seriously ill patients. Ethics consultations have grown significantly. Palliative Care as a Board-certified specialty is now four years old. It is not unusual for these specialties to encounter each other on the same case. It is, however, unclear how they relate to each other and what impact they have on the patients about whom they consult.
In principle, palliative care consultations are called when aggressive therapeutic interventions appear to offer no further benefit for patients. Ethics consultations are called when there are disputes over the values that are served by taking different clinical options. In practice, these functions often overlap. A palliative care consultation may stall over confusion and uncertainty about futility. Ethics may be summoned to untangle these disputes. Conversely, an ethics consultation may be summoned in situations where palliative care should be called; the ethics consultation may quickly determine that the case should be managed by palliative care.
The Program in Medicine and Human Values devotes its 2011 Summer Workshop to the relationship between ethics consultation and palliative care consultation. This Workshop is aimed at ethics committee members within the Sutter Health and Catholic Healthcare West systems and beyond. On June 11, we hope to attract palliative care specialists as well. The purpose is to open a dialogue about the issues mentioned above.
Our Program intends to initiate a fuller study of these questions. The Workshop will be a first step, seeking to gather the perspectives of those “on the ground” within the two specialties and to open communication between them. The results of the Workshop will be prepared in a report and circulated to participants. The Report will be the starting point for our further study.
The Goals of the Workshop are:
- To understand how to proceed when a medical judgment is made that palliative care is suitable and the family objects; and
- To describe best practice solutions when an ethical evaluation advises palliative care and the physician prefers to continue aggressive treatment.
Ethics and Palliative Medicine
11 June 2011
The Summer Workshop in Clinical Ethics will be held on 11 June 2011, 8:30 AM - 4:15 PM, at the University of San Francisco.
There will be 6.0 continuing education credits for Medicine and Chaplainsy and 6.3 for Nursing and Social Work.
Tuition is $75.00. A tuition reduction, totaling seventy dollars, has been made possible for all attendees thanks to a grant provided by the Sutter Health Institute for Research and Education.
Registration for this event is now closed.