Abstract
Several key developments in the United States in the practice of clinical ethics consultation have occurred since the New Jersey Supreme Court recommended such a service in the case of Quinlan in 1976 and the first requirements of such services for hospital accreditation by the Joint Commission in 1992. Research and scholarship have attempted to define what an ethics consultation is and its goals, the competencies that need to be enjoyed by those who provide consultation, and tools to provide quantitative and qualitative measures of a consultation effectiveness. More recently, different proposals have attempted to provide for a mechanism by which those who perform consultations can be certified as qualified to be an ethics consultant. In spite of the tremendous amount of such scholarship, there is no consensus on these issues, nor especially on the manner in which the facts of a case ought to be analyzed to come to some conclusion. More work will need to be done to bring some form of commonality to a discipline that by definition admits to a wide variety of approaches.
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Further Readings
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Tuohey, J.F., Dirksen, K.M. (2015). Clinical Ethics: Consultation. In: ten Have, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05544-2_90-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05544-2_90-1
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