2022 Volume 10 Pages 27-35
Nanto Municipal Hospital, a small/medium-sized hospital in Nanto City, Toyama Prefecture, launched a clinical ethics committee and an ethics consultation team in 2015. The committee is attended by the experts in philosophy/ethics and law, who regularly give lectures on ethics issues. An ethics consultation team is composed of a multidisciplinary member and holds a meeting within two days of receiving a request. After the meeting, not only the members’comments but also a summarized recommendation are returned to the client. From 2019, we have also trained in-hospital clinical ethics advisors so that ethics issues can be discussed on a daily basis at various sites by the leadership of those advisers. The ethics conferences are regularly hold mainly on a ward basis, and if the case is difficult to be resolved by the conferences, the case is re-examined by the ethic consultation, which system might be useful for fostering clinical ethics throughout the hospital. In this paper, we summarize the experience of establishment and activation of clinical ethics in our hospital, hoping that it will be helpful for hospitals and facilities that are considering promoting clinical ethics in the future.
