What Is It That You Want Me To Do? Guidance for Ethics Consultants in Complex Discharge Cases.

Some of the most difficult consultations for an ethics consultant to resolve are those in which the patient is ready to leave the acute-care setting, but the patient or family refuses the plan, or the plan is impeded by deficiencies in the healthcare system. Either way, the patient is "stuck" in the hospital and the ethics consultant is called to help get the patient "unstuck." These encounters, which we call "complex discharges," are beset with tensions between the interests of the institution and the interests of the patient as well as tensions within the ethics consultant whose commitments are shaped both by the values of the organization and the values of their own profession. The clinical ethics literature on this topic is limited and provides little guidance. What is needed is guidance for consultants operating at the bedside and for those participating at a higher organizational level. To fill this gap, we offer guidance for facilitating a fair process designed to resolve the conflict without resorting to coercive legal measures. We reflect on three cases to argue that the approach of the consultant is generally one of mediation in these types of disputes. For patients who lack decision making capacity and lack a surrogate decision maker, we recommend the creation of a complex discharge committee within the organization so that ethics consultants can properly discharge their duties to assist patients who are unable to advocate for themselves through a fair and transparent process.

Oral Health Matters: The Ethics of Providing Oral Health During COVID-19.

Oral health is a critical part of overall health. The current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of oral health. In this article, we describe how dental practice has been impacted by COVID-19, identify the public health response to COVID-19, and explain the gradual resumption of dental care after the initial disruption due to the pandemic. Finally, we discuss how long-standing health disparities in oral health have been exacerbated by the current pandemic.

Transitioning from Adolescence to Adulthood with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Overview of Planning and Legal Issues.

The transition to adulthood is complex. It is defined by many objective and subjective milestones. Transition from adolescence to young adulthood is challenging for both neurotypical individuals and individuals with autism spectrum disorders. However, for autistic individuals, this transition is even more complicated and poses a range of legal and ethical considerations. This article discusses how existing legal and social constructs may exacerbate rather than diminish barriers and access for autistic adults and identifies current and potential legal and policy solutions to reducing current systemic barriers. This article ultimately supports a supported decision-making model for autistic adolescents transitioning into adulthood.

"You took an Oath!": Engaging Medical Students About the Importance of Oaths and Codes Through Film and Television.

In this paper, we will consider the role of oaths and codes of ethics in undergraduate medical education. Studies of ethics syllabi suggest that ethics educators typically use well-known bioethics texts such as Beauchamp and Childress (Principles of biomedical ethics, 8th ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019). Yet, many issues that medical students will face (as students and as physicians) are addressed by codes of ethics and oaths. We will first provide a historical survey of oaths and codes and then address how these sources of ethical guidance can be effectively used in ethics education of medical students. Oaths and codes can be engagingly taught using a range of techniques including visual narrative. Excerpts from television and film can be used to highlight challenging ethical dilemmas in a variety of settings, taking the learning from the theoretical to the more applied while offering context.

Transitioning from Adolescence to Adulthood with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Overview of Planning and Legal Issues.

The transition to adulthood is complex. It is defined by many objective and subjective milestones. Transition from adolescence to young adulthood is challenging for both neurotypical individuals and individuals with autism spectrum disorders. However, for autistic individuals, this transition is even more complicated and poses a range of legal and ethical considerations. This article discusses how existing legal and social constructs may exacerbate rather than diminish barriers and access for autistic adults and identifies current and potential legal and policy solutions to reducing current systemic barriers. This article ultimately supports a supported decision-making model for autistic adolescents transitioning into adulthood.

What Is the Minimal Competency for a Clinical Ethics Consult Simulation? Setting a Standard for Use of the Assessing Clinical Ethics Skills (ACES) Tool.

Background: The field of clinical ethics is examining ways of determining competency. The Assessing Clinical Ethics Skills (ACES) tool offers a new approach that identifies a range of skills necessary in the conduct of clinical ethics consultation and provides a consistent framework for evaluating these skills. Through a training website, users learn to apply the ACES tool to clinical ethics consultants (CECs) in simulated ethics consultation videos. The aim is to recognize competent and incompetent clinical ethics consultation skills by watching and evaluating a videotaped CEC performance. We report how we set a criterion cut score (i.e., minimally acceptable score) for judging the ability of users of the ACES tool to evaluate simulated CEC performances. Methods: A modified Angoff standard-setting procedure was used to establish the cut score for an end-of-life case included on the ACES training website. The standard-setting committee viewed the Futility Case and estimated the probability that a minimally competent CEC would correctly answer each item on the ACES tool. The committee further adjusted these estimates by reviewing data from 31 pilot users of the Futility Case before determining the cut score. Results: Averaging over all 31 items, the proposed proportion correct score for minimal competency was 80%, corresponding to a cut score that is between 24 and 25 points out of 31 possible points. The standard-setting committee subsequently set the minimal competency cut score to 24 points. Conclusions: The cut score for the ACES tool identifies the number of correct responses a user of the ACES tool training website must attain to "pass" and reach minimal competency in recognizing competent and incompetent skills of the CECs in the simulated ethics consultation videos. The application of the cut score to live training of CECs and other areas of practice requires further investigation.

How Should a Physician Counsel a Vegan Patient With IBD Who Might Benefit From Supplements?

Veganism has grown in popularity in recent years. We argue that physicians should share the best available evidence on the efficacy of such diets while respectfully trying to understand the perspectives of patients who choose vegan diets. The first section establishes the need for physicians to understand reasons behind patients' dietary and health preferences. The second section considers evidence, or lack thereof, for nutritional supplementation in special populations, such as those practicing veganism.

A New Age of Patient Transparency: An Organizational Framework for Informed Consent.

With the many changes occurring in today's healthcare organizations, patients are increasingly equipped with a vast quantity of health care data and being more included in the healthcare decision-making process. The new approach we propose incorporates a new patient-organization framework that examines relevant historical, legal and ethical elements within the doctrine of informed consent in addition to examining the role of new healthcare organizations' obligations to include data to support addressing issues such as population health, health outcomes and health disparities within the informed consent. There is a growing consensus among healthcare professionals that using an evidencebased organizational informed consent framework to improve the informed consent process can lead to better comprehension, health outcomes, transparency and improved patient trust and retention overall.

Navigating Clinical Ethics: Using Real Case Constellations to Guide Learners and Teachers in Medicine.

Case-based learning is a staple of clinical ethics education in medicine. The sources for medical educators generally are lengthy case books or single, often rare, case analyses in the literature. Busy clinicians may not have the time or inclination to sift through case books to find suitable teaching material, and the latter present unusual cases that many physicians may never encounter in their own practice. Relatively few articles present multiple cases involving ethical issues that are likely to appear in everyday practice in an accessible format for teaching. To fill this gap, we developed a series of paradigmatic cases based on the recurrent themes we identified through a systematic analysis of our clinical ethics consultations in a 5-year period and our collective clinical ethics judgment. We constructed four amalgam "bread-and-butter" ethics cases that are not overly service specific and can be used in medical and residency education along with specific questions for discussion. Topics include decision-making capacity, withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatment, patient wishes and do not resuscitate orders, and brain death. Our objective was to help a range of residents and other physicians become more confident and facile in identifying and addressing recurrent ethical issues in their practice.

Developing an Evaluation Tool for Assessing Clinical Ethics Consultation Skills in Simulation Based Education: The ACES Project.

The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities has created a quality attestation (QA) process for clinical ethics consultants; the pilot phase of reviewing portfolios has begun. One aspect of the QA process which is particularly challenging is assessing the interpersonal skills of individual clinical ethics consultants. We propose that using case simulation to evaluate clinical ethics consultants is an approach that can meet this need provided clear standards for assessment are identified. To this end, we developed the Assessing Clinical Ethics Skills (ACES) tool, which identifies and specifies specific behaviors that a clinical ethics consultant should demonstrate in an ethics case simulation. The aim is for the clinical ethics consultant or student to use a videotaped case simulation, along with the ACES tool scored by a trained rater, to demonstrate their competence as part of their QA portfolio. The development and piloting of the tool is described.

What Ethical Issues Really Arise in Practice at an Academic Medical Center? A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Clinical Ethics Consultations from 2008 to 2013.

As the field of clinical ethics consultation sets standards and moves forward with the Quality Attestation process, questions should be raised about what ethical issues really do arise in practice. There is limited data on the type and number of ethics consultations conducted across different settings. At Loyola University Medical Center, we conducted a retrospective review of our ethics consultations from 2008 through 2013. One hundred fifty-six cases met the eligibility criteria. We analyzed demographic data on these patients and conducted a content analysis of the ethics consultation write-ups coding both the frequency of ethical issues and most significant, or key, ethical issue per case. Patients for whom ethics consultation was requested were typically male (55.8 %), white (57.1 %), between 50 and 69 years old (38.5 %), of non-Hispanic origin (85.9 %), and of Roman Catholic faith (43.6 %). Nearly half (47.4 %) were in the intensive care unit and 44.2 % died in the hospital. The most frequent broad ethical categories were decision-making (93.6 %), goals of care/treatment (80.8 %), and end-of-life (73.1 %). More specifically, capacity (57.1 %), patient's wishes/autonomy (54.5 %), and surrogate decision maker (51.3 %) were the most frequent particular ethical issues. The most common key ethical issues were withdrawing/withholding treatment (12.8 %), patient wishes/autonomy (12.2 %), and capacity (11.5 %). Our findings provide additional data to inform the training of clinical ethics consultants regarding the ethical issues that arise in practice. A wider research agenda should be formed to collect and compare data across institutions to improve education and training in our field.