Case consultation in clinical ethics (ethics consultation) is a rapidly expanding health care service that, proponents argue, can improve patient care by resolving ethical dilemmas, ensuring quality ethical decision- making, and mediating ethical conflicts among patients, families, and health care providers. The rapid growth in the practice of ethics consultation has occurred, however, without either consensus about its goals or rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of various approaches to its delivery. To begin to address these gaps, we propose a three-day working conference of experts in the fields of medical ethics, ethics consultation, evaluative techniques, research methodology, and health services research who will clarify the goals of ethics consultation and identify some of the most promising measurement and design strategies for evaluating its outcomes. The conference format will enable us to bring together a multidisciplinary group of individuals who would otherwise have little opportunity to interact and share their expertise. The specific conference objectives are; to enumerate the goals of ethics consultation, to specify workable outcome measures for evaluating ethics consultation, and to devise specific research strategies to evaluate ethics consultation. Thirty-one leaders who represent a wide variety of disciplines and institutions are committed to participating in the conference, which will be held in Chicago in September, 1995. The conference format will combine plenary sessions and small group meetings. Three working groups will emphasize different aspects of the evaluation process: goals of ethics consultation, measurable outcomes, and research strategies. After the conference, each group will draft a summary statement conforming to a specified format. Included int he plan for dissemination of findings is a commitment from the Journal of Clinical Ethics to publish the conference proceedings. The conference is expected to create a nucleus of interested investigators who will form multidisciplinary research teams and conduct collaborative studies to evaluate ethics consultation.
| Tulsky, J A; Fox, E (1996) Evaluating ethics consultation: framing the questions. J Clin Ethics 7:109-15 |
| Fox, E; Tulsky, J A (1996) Evaluation research and the future of ethics consultation. J Clin Ethics 7:146-9 |
| Tulsky, J A; Stocking, C B (1996) Obstacles and opportunities in the design of ethics consultation evaluation. J Clin Ethics 7:139-45 |
