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The Emergence of Institutional Ethics Committees

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2021

Ronald E. Cranford  and
A. Edward Doudera
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Extract

The institutional ethics committee an entity that many have long believed capable of solving many of the medical, legal, and ethical problems that exist in modern health care-is now being adopted by increasing numbers of institutions. Utilized sporadically since the 1970s, ethics committees began to receive renewed and heightened attention in late 1982. Cases such as those in Los Angeles where two physicians who were charged with first degree murder for removing, at the request of the family, intravenous feeding tubes, from a comatose, severely brain-damaged patient, the Infant Doe case from Bloomington, Indiana, and the more recent case of Baby Jane Doe from New York State, have generated an enormous amount of interest and publicity and provided a new impetus toward institutional ethics committees.

Type
Article
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , February 1984 , pp. 13 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1984

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References

This article is an adaptation of Cranford, R.E. Doudera, A.E., The Emergence of Ethics Committees, in Institutional Ethics Committees and Healthcare Decisionmaking (Cranford, R.E. Doudera, A.E., eds.) (Health Administration Press, Ann Arbor, Mich.) (forthcoming 1984) [hereinafter referred to as IECs and Decisionmaking]. This book is developed from a conference held by the American Society of Law & Medicine in April 1983, which convened a faculty of national distinction from a variety of disciplines to discuss various aspects of ethics committees and to try to develop some consensus on what these committees are and should be. Their papers form the first section of this book. Other sections consist of descriptive summaries of actual committees and model guidelines.Google Scholar
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