NEWS and UPCOMING EVENT
REGISTRATION IS OPEN for the 37th Annual WVNEC Symposium!!
Click on brochure below for additional information and to register.
Ethical issues arise in the care of patients every day. Yet most West Virginia hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, and home care agencies do not have ethicists.
Nonetheless, the Joint Commission expects them to “…develop and implement a process that allows staff, [patients], and families to address ethical issues or issues prone to conflict.” Implementing such a process when there is not a person in the organization who has advanced ethics training can be challenging.
This symposium will assist with this challenge in the following ways:
- role model a process for ethics consultation with panel and audience discussion in three cases—the “permanent” hospital patient, moral distress over suboptimal care, and applying West Virginia Health Care law to proactively resolve family conflict;
- present a talk on ethics consultation in rural hospitals;
- describe the ethical concerns of patients and families, concerns that those doing ethics consults should be aware of and address; and
- explain WVNEC’s tertiary ethics consultation approach in which ethicists from the WVU Center for Health Ethics and Law assist staff in hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, and home health to address ethical issues and contribute to their resolution in patient care.
The goal is to better prepare symposium attendees to perform ethics consultation in their health care setting. The target audience for this symposium is physicians, advanced practice nurses, physician assistants, nurses, social workers, chaplains, attorneys, and others who have an interest in this topic.
Mission Statement
The West Virginia Network of Ethics Committees assists hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, and home health care agencies to strengthen ethics committees; provides education regarding ethical and legal issues in health care to promote ethically sound decision making; and helps patients and families to make their end-of-life wishes known.
The West Virginia Network of Ethics Committees (WVNEC) is coordinated by the Center for Health Ethics and Law of the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center of West Virginia University. If you have questions about or for the Network, please send them to Linda McMillen at lmcmillen@hsc.wvu.edu.