No Patient Left Behind: Universal Screening for Palliative Care Needs (526)

Abstract

Objectives 1. Define and distinguish between bias, prejudice, and judgment in the process of ethical discernment, and identify examples of each. 2. Describe a variety of current models for the relationship between palliative care and clinical ethics consultation in the hospital setting. 3. Gain appreciation of varying strategies to control for unjustified moral biases in ethics consultation. These strategies deploy a range of checks and balances. In many clinical settings ethics consultants and palliative medicine consultants overlap significantly in the patients and families they encounter. Though the role of an ethics consultant differs from that of a palliative care consultant, it is common for palliative care team members to be called upon as participants in the resolution of ethical disputes. Given the particularity and limitations of palliative care experience and expertise, it is possible that palliative care consultants are subject to unrecognized moral biases that impact the final resolutions of clinical-ethical conflicts. This session will draw on the experience of a panel of experts who serve both as palliative medicine and clinical ethics consultants to discuss whether palliative care consultants should concomitantly involve themselves in formal mechanisms of addressing clinical ethical disputes. The panel will use clinical cases to address the problem of dealing with moral biases and discerning when they make ethical consultation problematic. The panel will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a range of models for relating ethics and palliative care mechanisms in the clinical setting with particular focus on how those models accentuate or mitigate unjustified biases. Audience participants will be actively engaged in the discussion.