Regional Clinical Ethics Conference -- Good End of Life Care

The Washington Hospital Center's Center for Ethics and Bioethics Committee are hosting the first of a series in conferences relating to clinical ethics issues faced by clinicians in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) region.  This Inaugural DMV Regional Hospital ClinicalEthics Conference will be focused on how hospital ethics committees can contribute to improving end-of-life care for patients at each participant's own hospital.  Here is a further description:

This one-day conference on clinical ethics is focused on hospital clinicians and other professionals throughout the metropolitan region. Most hospitals have ethics committees made up of physicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, clinical ethicists and other clinicians and administrators who address the clinical ethics needs of their own institution. This conference is designed to be the first in a series of annual meetings to bring together members of these hospital ethics committees and other health professionals to 1) establish a regional network of hospital professionals dedicated to elevating the quality of clinical care within each institution, 2) to work together to develop solutions to common ethical problems and 3) to determine whether such a network will improve the ethical quality of healthcare.

Notably, the DC area already has a resource for individual facility ethics committees to join together for education and resource sharing:  the Maryland Healthcare Ethics Committee Network based at the University of Maryland Law School.  DC-MD-VA facilities now have multiple opportunities to improve the work of ethics committees and ethics consultants.  Now, if only other areas of the country developed similar resources for the facilities in their regions.