center unravels dilemmas
Health-care ethics
BY ROXANNE MOSTER
UCLA Today
Medical advances, the explosion in information technologies and
increasing economic pressures have introduced unprecedented ethical
issues in health care and end-of-life care.
How do doctors choose which patients will receive the newest treatments?
Must economic factors interfere with the trust in the doctor/patient/family
relationship and impede optimal bedside patient care? Where is the
balance if ethical issues become obstacles to technological development
and medical advancement?
To explore these increasingly complex issues, UCLA Healthcare
has created an ethics center to advance the debate and reason through
the vexing ethical conundrums that complicate everyday medicine.
“Hospitals such as UCLA Medical Center that develop and
provide cutting-edge medicine need a mechanism to balance complicated
medical and ethical issues,” said Neil Wenger, the center’s
director and professor of medicine and health services research.
“Academic medical centers often confront complex life and
death questions. We must help patients and their families through
the process of negotiating difficult ethical decisions.”
The UCLA Healthcare Ethics Center will focus the efforts of the
university, the David Geffen School of Medicine, the hospital’s
social and pastoral care workers, legal experts and faculty and
staff from UCLA’s professional schools — such as nursing
and public health — on developing innovative, humanistic solutions
to ethical dilemmas.
Initial funding is being provided by the Partnership for Care,
an unrestricted fund supported by friends and patients of the hospital,
and by gifts from members of the UCLA Medical Center’s Board
of Advisors. Another gift given to the hospital in honor of one
of its board members will enable the center to offer an annual public
lecture in medical ethics.
“Hospitalists and Continuity of Care: Ethical Issues”
will be the subject of a lecture today by Bernard Lo, director of
UC San Francisco’s Program in Medical Ethics.
The center’s Visiting Professor in Ethics Lecture is open
to all and will be held at 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the NPI Auditorium.
For more information, call (310) 794-0185. |
