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Evaluating the effectiveness of clinical ethics committees: a systematic review
Clinical Ethics Committees (CECs), as distinct from Research Ethics Committees, were originally established with the aim of supporting healthcare professionals in managing controversial clinical ethical issues. However, it is still unclear whether they manage to accomplish this task and what is thei...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer Netherlands
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7910230/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33219898 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11019-020-09986-9 |
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author | Crico, Chiara Sanchini, Virginia Casali, Paolo Giovanni Pravettoni, Gabriella |
author_facet | Crico, Chiara Sanchini, Virginia Casali, Paolo Giovanni Pravettoni, Gabriella |
author_sort | Crico, Chiara |
collection | PubMed |
description | Clinical Ethics Committees (CECs), as distinct from Research Ethics Committees, were originally established with the aim of supporting healthcare professionals in managing controversial clinical ethical issues. However, it is still unclear whether they manage to accomplish this task and what is their impact on clinical practice. This systematic review aims to collect available assessments of CECs’ performance as reported in literature, in order to evaluate CECs’ effectiveness. We retrieved all literature published up to November 2019 in six databases (PubMed, Ovid MEDLINE, Scopus, Philosopher’s Index, Embase and Web of Science), following PRISMA guidelines. We included only articles specifically addressing CECs and providing any form of CECs performance assessment. Twenty-nine articles were included. Ethics consultation was the most evaluated of CECs’ functions. We did not find standardized tools for measuring CECs’ efficacy, but 33% of studies considered “user satisfaction” as an indicator, with 94% of them reporting an average positive perception of CECs’ impact. Changes in patient treatment and a decrease of moral distress in health personnel were reported as additional outcomes of ethics consultation. The highly diverse ways by which CECs carry out their activities make CECs’ evaluation difficult. The adoption of shared criteria would be desirable to provide a reliable answer to the question about their effectiveness. Nonetheless, in general both users and providers consider CECs as helpful, relevant to their work, able to improve the quality of care. Their main function is ethics consultation, while less attention seems to be devoted to bioethics education and policy formation. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7910230 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Springer Netherlands |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-79102302021-03-15 Evaluating the effectiveness of clinical ethics committees: a systematic review Crico, Chiara Sanchini, Virginia Casali, Paolo Giovanni Pravettoni, Gabriella Med Health Care Philos Review Article Clinical Ethics Committees (CECs), as distinct from Research Ethics Committees, were originally established with the aim of supporting healthcare professionals in managing controversial clinical ethical issues. However, it is still unclear whether they manage to accomplish this task and what is their impact on clinical practice. This systematic review aims to collect available assessments of CECs’ performance as reported in literature, in order to evaluate CECs’ effectiveness. We retrieved all literature published up to November 2019 in six databases (PubMed, Ovid MEDLINE, Scopus, Philosopher’s Index, Embase and Web of Science), following PRISMA guidelines. We included only articles specifically addressing CECs and providing any form of CECs performance assessment. Twenty-nine articles were included. Ethics consultation was the most evaluated of CECs’ functions. We did not find standardized tools for measuring CECs’ efficacy, but 33% of studies considered “user satisfaction” as an indicator, with 94% of them reporting an average positive perception of CECs’ impact. Changes in patient treatment and a decrease of moral distress in health personnel were reported as additional outcomes of ethics consultation. The highly diverse ways by which CECs carry out their activities make CECs’ evaluation difficult. The adoption of shared criteria would be desirable to provide a reliable answer to the question about their effectiveness. Nonetheless, in general both users and providers consider CECs as helpful, relevant to their work, able to improve the quality of care. Their main function is ethics consultation, while less attention seems to be devoted to bioethics education and policy formation. Springer Netherlands 2020-11-21 2021 /pmc/articles/PMC7910230/ /pubmed/33219898 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11019-020-09986-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Review Article Crico, Chiara Sanchini, Virginia Casali, Paolo Giovanni Pravettoni, Gabriella Evaluating the effectiveness of clinical ethics committees: a systematic review |
title | Evaluating the effectiveness of clinical ethics committees: a systematic review |
title_full | Evaluating the effectiveness of clinical ethics committees: a systematic review |
title_fullStr | Evaluating the effectiveness of clinical ethics committees: a systematic review |
title_full_unstemmed | Evaluating the effectiveness of clinical ethics committees: a systematic review |
title_short | Evaluating the effectiveness of clinical ethics committees: a systematic review |
title_sort | evaluating the effectiveness of clinical ethics committees: a systematic review |
topic | Review Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7910230/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33219898 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11019-020-09986-9 |
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