No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Healthcare ethics committees (HEC) recently emerged from the cauldron of North America's secular pluralistic societies that are presently immersed in an unrestrained expansion of biomedical science and technology. These HECs function at the intersection of multiple and often conflicting forces that bear on the delivery of high quality health care.
Articles in HEC Forum and elsewhere have highlighted a number of important issues for HECs to consider, but they frequently reflect only one side of the argument, leaving the reader, if time permits, to conjure the counterarguments.
POINT AND COUNTERPOINT, as a special section of HEC Forum, intends to redress this problem of omission through the brief examination of timely issues with which HECs must actually grapple within healthcare institutions that serve the disabled, sick, and dying.
For example, given the ongoing economic crisis, reflected in part by limited resources, human as well as material, and given the rapid changes in methods of healthcare delivery and health professional responsibilities, the time has come when we must be explicit about whether or not cost considerations should be entertained during concurrent case reviews. This is a topic that energizes the emotions and is further exacerbated by the dim vision of how HECs should relate to their parent institutions as well as to physicians, nurses, patients, and local communities. Such issues can no longer be ignored merely because they are difficult; the critical questions will not simply disappear from sight. If anything, HECs that fail to openly discuss, e.g., whether or not they should address various economic factors during their concurrent case reviews, will only serve to encourage their members to argue past rather than with one another.
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