Ethics committees

AMNews, the weekly newsletter of the American Medical Association, this week considers the role of the hospital ethics committee, including potential limitations and barriers to ethics consultation by physicians.

The article mentions the VA initiative to transform the ethics committee model, coordinated by the VA's National Center for Ethics in Health Care. The IntegratedEthics initiative began rolling out to all VA medical centers in May 2007 and their web site includes a wealth of training information and other tools, including Ethics Consultation: Responding to Ethics Questions in Health Care, a primer for ethics consultants.

Medicine and the popular media this week

Related to this previous post about the NPT series, "Remaking American Medicine", other popular media outlets are scrutinizing how healthcare is changing, and positive potential directions for the future of medicine in the US:

- USA Today: "In medicine, evidence can be confusing" - the challenges faced by clinicians and by patients in understanding how the evidence from clinical research should be applied to a given care decision (plus additional stories linked at the top of the USA Today page under the feature "Prescription for change: fixing American healthcare")

- Newsweek: "Fixing America's hospitals" - case studies from 10 healthcare organizations that have developed innovative strategies for reducing medical error and improving the quality of healthcare delivered to their patients (plus more stories, including an article by David Bates about EMRs and paperless medicine, via Newsweek's "Health for Life section).

Remaking American medicine miniseries

I saw this when reading about the new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation EMR report - they are also funding a PBS miniseries, "Remaking American medicine: health care for the 21st century." The episodes started airing earlier this month and clips are available on the web site. The site also includes a webcast of a related symposium, "Champions of Change: A National Symposium on Improving Health Care," from the end of September. The symposium included leaders from the clinical and technical side as well as commentary by patient advocates.