Newswise — Medical advancements, the explosion of information availability, and economic pressures have created unprecedented ethical issues in health care and end-of-life care. How do we choose which patients will receive the newest treatments? Must economic factors, information technologies and genetic breakthroughs threaten trust in the doctor-patient-family relationship and impede optimal bedside care for patients? Where is the balance if ethical issues become obstacles to technological development and medical advancement?
To explore these increasingly complex issues, UCLA Healthcare has created the UCLA Healthcare Ethics Center. The center's mission is to provide education, service and research to enhance the practice of medicine for patients, families, professionals and the public. In service to that mission, the center hopes to advance the ethics debate and examine the vexing ethical conundrums that complicate everyday medicine.
"Hospitals such as UCLA Medical Center that develop and provide cutting edge medicine need a mechanism to balance complicated medical and ethical issues" said Dr. Neil Wenger, the center's director and a UCLA professor of medicine and health services research. "Academic medical centers often confront complex life and death questions. We must help patients and their families through the process of negotiating difficult ethical decisions. This center builds on our ethics consultation service by promulgating innovative research, providing opportunities for creative policy development and enhancing the knowledge and activities of doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains and medical students in addressing ethical issues at the patients' bedside."
According to Marge Cunningham, associate director of the UCLA Medical Center, another of the center's goals will be to provide support to local community hospitals and health care institutions that may not have robust ethics resources upon which to rely.
Katherine Brown-Saltzman, a clinical nurse specialist at UCLA and a palliative care specialist, stressed the effect the new center's undertakings will have on patients.
"This center, in a context of medical advancement, economic constraints and patient need, provides resources to explore and develop potential solutions to some of the problems facing our society today," she said. "We aim to have a positive impact on patients here at UCLA, and elsewhere. The center will:· Promote the care of patients in an environment that is humanistic and compassionate.· Draw on the perspectives of health professionals, patients and families.· Address the challenges of rapid socioeconomic, cultural and technological changes in health care.· Utilize the rich and diverse UCLA academic resources to reach out to the community and combine the strengths and perspectives of various disciplines and professions.· Carry out innovative research to advance ethical aspects of health care and health policy.· Host community lectures on medical-ethical topics of public interest.
Utilizing resources and experts in the fields of social work, pastoral care, nursing, public health and law, among others, the UCLA Healthcare Ethics Center focuses the efforts of the university, the David Geffen School of Medicine and UCLA Medical Center on developing innovative, humanistic solutions to new ethical issues in patient care.
Initial funding for the UCLA Healthcare Ethics Center is being provided by Partnership for Care, a fund supported by friends and grateful patients of UCLA Medical Center, and by gifts from members of the medical center's board of advisors. In addition, a gift given to the medical center in honor of one of its board members will enable the UCLA Healthcare Ethics Center to offer an annual public lecture in medical ethics.
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