Healthcare ethics committees:

■■ Address legal-ethical issues that arise during the course of a patient’s care and treatment.

■■ Serve as a hospital resource to patients, families, and staff, offering an objective counsel when dealing with difficult healthcare issues and decisions.

■■ Should be structured to include a wide range of community leaders.

■■ Goals of the ethics committee include:

• Promote patient rights.

• Assist patient and family in resolving ethical dilemmas.

• Educate and advise healthcare providers, patients, and families on how to analyze ethical dilemmas.

• Serve as a hospital resource designed to offer objective counsel.

■■ The committee performs functions by:

• Developing policy and procedure guidelines to assist in resolving ethical dilemmas.

• Educating staff and community.

• Resolving conflicts.

• Reviewing cases.

• Offering support and consultation.

• Offering political advocacy.

• Providing consultation services when conflict arises.

■■ Reasoning is the process of forming conclusions, judgments, or inferences based on one’s interpretation of facts or premises.

• Partial reasoning involves bias for or against a person based on one’s relationship with that person.

• Circular reasoning describes a person who has already decided the correctness of something.