For Experts Only? Access to Hospital Ethics Committees

Abstract

How closely involved with hospital ethics committees should patients\nand their families become? Should they routinely have access to committees,\nor be empowered to initiate consultations? To what extent should they be\ninformed of the content or outcome of committee deliberations? Seeing ethics\ncommittees as the locus of competing responsibilities allows us to respond to\nthe questions posed by a patient rights model