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Tidskrift

Sammanfattning

Back­ground. All health en­ter­pri­ses in Nor­way to­day have at least one clin­ical ethics committee (CEC). One of the aims is to give advice and to counsel the hos­pital staff on eth­ical is­su­es. As part of the qual­ity assurance of this work, we wanted to find out if clinicians have benefited from these committees in individual cases. Ma­te­ri­al and methodology. The local committees were requested to distribute a ques­tion­naire to all clinicians who had submitted a case to the committee du­ring the previous 18 months. The survey was an­onym­ous. Out of the 86 questionnaires that were distributed, 43 (50?%) were returned to the Cent­re for Me­di­cal Ethics. Results. The majority of clinicians had a number of rea­sons for contacting the committee. The most usual reason was the desire to have a broad consultation on a case (70?%), which was regarded as useful. The most common issue discussed was limiting the treat­ment of a seriously ill patient (56?%), the will/wishes of the next-of-kin (40?%) and patient autonomy (37?%). The committee gave advice in 50?% of the cases. Thirty-eight percent of the consultations resulted in prac­tical consequences, including the dis­con­tinu­ation of treat­ment in six cases. Interpretation. Be­cause of the low response per­cent­age, the results must be inter­preted with caution. The work of the committees is generally evalu­ated as useful, and the consultations can have prac­tical consequences. How­ever, it is challenging to make this work ­better known among clinicians and to conduct qual­ity assurance.

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