The necessity of ethical support for health care professionals in Intensive Care: Role and competencies of the Clinical Ethics Committee

Abstract

Promoting measures that aim to mitigate discrepancies in the decision-making process, ensuring adequate training of physicians in the ethical aspect of care, and incrementing the wellbeing of patients and their families are becoming the principal objectives for high-quality care, especially in the Intensive Medicine Unit (ICU). In this paper, we’re going to deal with the implementation of a specific ethics support for the ICU health care professionals, and considering the advanced Spanish experience on this matter, it deals with the current potentialities and limits of CEC’s role to improve the quality of health care assistance.

Keywords

• decision-making process
• ethical support
• clinic ethics committee
• advanced directive
• intensive medicine unit