Services

Why Access Professional Ethics Services?

Professional Ethics Services can yield many fiscal and other benefits for health-care organizations, staff, patients, and families. Such services can, for example, lead to cost savings in health-care settings by:

–Reducing lengths of stay,
–Avoiding unnecessary interventions, and
–Promoting more efficient resource allocation.

Some cost-savings estimates for organizations have been as high as $288,827.00 over a six-month period (or approximately $12,000 per patient consulted on).

Access to professional ethics services can also lead to:

–Resolving ethical issues and conflict,
–Improved organizational culture,
–Decreases in moral distress and burnout, and
–Improvements in patient and family-centered care.

What Professional Ethics Services are available?

Identification of your Ethical Needs

To promote the culture and mission of each partner organization, part of the ethics support available includes the identification of your ethical needs as a unique organization. The identification of ethical needs is multi-layered, from individual patient/client/resident and staff ethical concerns, to organizational ethical concerns, and is integral in developing integrated ethics programming that is reflective of your reality and available ethics resources.

Ethics Consultation Services (ECS)

ECS are services that aim to help patients/clients, families, staff and other stakeholders resolve ethical concerns in your organization. All health care organizations should support and ensure timely access to ECS. This recommendation aligns with Accreditation Canada requirements. The goal of ECS is to improve health care quality by facilitating the resolution of ethical concerns.  Ethics consultation may be performed by an individual ethicist, an ethics committee, an ethics consultation team or a mix of all three models. The level of support will depend on the needs of your organization and the circumstances of the requested consultation.

  1. If necessary, support can be provided to help you develop an ethics committee. The Regional Ethicist can serve as an advisor for that committee or serve on the committee.
  2. A Regional Ethicist can provide ethics consultation as an individual ethics consultant on a case-by-case basis.

Organizational Ethics Support

Effective mechanisms for addressing ethical concerns depend on leadership support, expertise, time, resources, and formal policies.

  1. Support can be provided for the development or revisions of your ethics-related policies including, for example, policies pertaining to health care consent, the terms of references of your ethics committee or the process of how to request an ethics consultation, and others.
  2. Support can be provided on how your ECS should be documented, tracked or made available for educational purpose.
  3. Support can be provided to revise, develop, implement and make known your clinical and organizational ethical framework; again, an Accreditation Canada requirement.
  4. Support can be provided to revise or develop an organizational approach to ethics that is responsive and meets standards of access and accountability.
  5. Support in refining the values and mission statement of the organization can be provided.

Ethics Capacity-Building and Education

To positively impact the environment and culture of any organization, capacity-building and ethics education have to be planned and ongoing.

  1. Specific education sessions can be provided on a case-by-case basis on different topics such as moral distress, community ethics, end-of-life issues, living at risk, boundaries setting, value-centered care, ethics and elderly care, and organizational ethics. Additional topics can be identified in collaboration with the organization.
  2. Partner organizations are invited to participate in regularly-scheduled regional ethics rounds
  3. Out-reach sessions and introductions to ethics can be organized to make the ECS known throughout the organization.
  4. The existence of and instructions on how to use the clinical and organizational ethical framework can be organized.
  5. Support in the preparation of educational materials can be provided (e.g. ethics services brochures).

Accreditation Canada Ethics Support

Expertise and support in meeting Accreditation Canada’s Leadership and Governance standards related to ethics can be provided at all levels, from Governance to front-line staff. The ethics team has a 100% success record in helping organizations meet or exceed Accreditation Canada standards for ethics.

For more information about our services or to learn about our partnership fee structure, please contact the ethics office at: ethics@centraleastethics.ca.