Courses
SAVE THE DATE!
Most hospitals, especially those with fewer than 300 beds, and certainly most nursing homes, hospices, and home care agencies, do not have ethicists. Nonetheless, the Joint Commission has an Element of Performance Standard in the Leadership chapter, LD.04.03, “The [hospital] develops and implements a process that allows staff, [patients], and families to address ethical issues or issues prone to conflict.” Furthermore, to provide quality patient-centered care, hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, and home health care agencies should have such a process to address values conflicts between patients/families and the treating team, between physicians and nurses or other health care staff, and within families if the conflict prevents timely decisions about patient treatment. The goal of this symposium is to better prepare attendees to perform ethics consultation in their health care setting.
2024-2025 Noon Webinar Series
This year’s WVNEC webinar series is once again brought to you in collaboration with the Charleston Area Medical Center’s Geriatrics Lunch and Learn Series. For those who provide ethics consultation or give ethics advice, the cases for the 2024-2025 WVNEC webinar series are timely and relevant.
They cover a discussion of frequent clinical, ethical, and legal questions that arise in patient care for incapacitated patients including…
1) making decisions with the Medical Power of Attorney (MPOA) representatives when there is conflict between them and what to do when the MPOA representative is not authorized to change the POST form, but the patient’s condition has deteriorated;
2) evaluating patients for abuse and neglect, and the Adult Protective Services procedure for removing a family member as health care surrogate and agreeing to assume that responsibility;
3) responding to a special directive, “shock me up to 5 times,” that is determined to be outside the standard of care;
4) deciding how to proceed when the death of a patient who donated his body to the Human Gift Registry but then was not eligible to be used raises questions about the authority of the MPOA representative, the reasons why a Human Gift Registry may not accept a patient’s body even though the proper documentation was completed, and the value of writing funeral arrangements in a MPOA; and
5) paying attention to psychosocial spiritual issues and using excellent interpersonal communication skills to respond to a family’s request for medically ineffective treatment when having a good policy was not enough.
WVNEC would really appreciate your input and requests concerning educational opportunities. What do you want to learn, discuss, or practice? Do you want lectures, case discussions, policy sharing? Whatever it is, let us know, and we will do what we can to make distance learning/sharing as interesting and educational as possible.
For additional information or suggestions for future webinars, contact Linda McMillen at lmcmillen@hsc.wvu.edu or 304-293-7618.