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Can UK Clinical Ethics Committees Improve Quality of Care?

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Abstract

Failings in patient care and quality in NHS Trusts have become a recurring theme over the past few years. In this paper, we examine the Care Quality Commission’s Guidance about Compliance: Essential Standards of Quality and Safety and ask how NHS Trusts might be better supported in fulfilling the regulations specified therein. We argue that clinical ethics committees (CECs) have a role to play in this regard. We make this argument by attending to the many ethical elements that are highlighted in the Commission’s Regulations and by providing practical examples of how CECs can (and in some case already do) provide ethics support to health professionals and trusts. Although CECs have been traditionally associated with case consultation, i.e., discrete problems caused by individual circumstances, in the previous 10 years the literature suggests that clinical ethics services have become more integrated into the life of the health care organization and are increasing construed as proactive agents of systematic change. We provide evidence from a recent survey of UK clinical ethics services that this trend is present in the UK.

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Notes

  1. For a more detailed discussion of the way in which personalized, dignified and respectful care is related to ethical care see McClimans et al. (2011).

  2. See Nelson et al. (2010), Opel et al. (2009a), Fox et al. (2007a, b) for frameworks for dealing with recurring ethical issues.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1004 Carola Ave, Columbia, SC, USA

    Leah McClimans

  2. Warwick Medical School, Coventry, UK

    Anne-Marie Slowther

  3. Division of Public Health and Primary Health Care, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Michael Parker

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  1. Leah McClimans
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  2. Anne-Marie Slowther
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  3. Michael Parker
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Correspondence to Leah McClimans.

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McClimans, L., Slowther, AM. & Parker, M. Can UK Clinical Ethics Committees Improve Quality of Care?. HEC Forum 24, 139–147 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-012-9175-z

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