Medical Ethics Committee - Case Consultation
Ethics case consultation is a service offered by the MEC to help physicians, hospital staff, patients, and families examine moral questions that may arise in the care of a patient.
Case consultation is designed to help all those involved in the patient's care to understand the situation clearly, identify potential options, and come to a reasonable resolution of the question.
Any PCMH patient, a patient's family member, guardian or health care agent, or any member of the health care team may request an ethics case consultation at any time, day or night, by contacting a hospital patient representative or chaplain.
To contact a patient representative or chaplain, please call the hospital switchboard at 252:847.4100 and ask for the patient representative or chaplain on call. The patient representative or chaplain will, in turn, contact the chair of the Case Consultation Subcommittee (CCS) or of the full MEC. The CCS or MEC chair will contact the person who made the request to discuss the situation and may offer suggestions to resolve the issue. If the chair believes that a case consultation would be helpful, he or she will call a meeting of the CCS, usually within 48 hours of the request. The CCS members will meet with members of the health care team, members of the patient's family, and the patient (if competent). The chair will convene the meeting, and explain that the purpose of the meeting is to explore the issues posed by the case and to help those involved come to a mutually agreeable resolution of the issues. The patient's attending physician or another member of the health care team will present the case and issues it poses, followed by open discussion of the issues. CCS members will seek to clarify the issues, identify and discuss alternative courses of action, and, if appropriate, suggest a course of action. Any suggestion offered by the CCS is purely advisory; patients or their surrogates and their health care providers retain the authority to make health care decisions.
For further information about case consultaion, contact the Bioethics Center at 252:744-2361.
