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Bernard Lo, MD

JAMA. 2003;290:1208-1210.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Ethics consultations are touted for resolving ethical dilemmas, and most hospitals use them to meet the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations' requirement for a process to resolve conflicts in patient care.¹ Little rigorous evidence is available, however, about the outcomes of ethics consultations.^2-3 In this issue of THE JOURNAL, Schneiderman and colleagues⁴ report a multisite randomized controlled trial to evaluate ethics consultations. The intervention, which builds on a previous single-center randomized trial,⁵ involved ethics consultation in the intensive care unit (ICU) for conflicts and value disagreements either among the health care team or between the team and patients or surrogates. The comparison group received standard care, in which 25% of those patients chose ethics consultation. Schneiderman et al found that patients in the intervention group who died spent 3 fewer days in the hospital, 1.4 fewer days in the ICU, and 1.7 fewer days . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliation: Program in Medical Ethics, Division of General Internal Medicine, and Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco.

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Ethics Consultation in the Intensive Care Unit
Quigley
JAMA 2003;290:3191-3191.
FULL TEXT