Calendar of Events
37th Annual WVNEC Symposium
No Ethicist on Staff: The Challenge of Doing Ethics Consults
May 30, 2025
Stonewall Resort and Conference Center
Roanoke, WV
Ethical issues arise in the care of patients every day. Yet most West Virginia hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, and home care agencies do not have ethicists.
Nonetheless, the Joint Commission expects them to “…develop and implement a process that allows staff, [patients], and families to address ethical issues or issues prone to conflict.” Implementing such a process when there is not a person in the organization who has advanced ethics training can be challenging.
This symposium will assist with this challenge in the following ways:
- role model a process for ethics consultation with panel and audience discussion in three cases—the “permanent” hospital patient, moral distress over suboptimal care, and applying West Virginia Health Care law to proactively resolve family conflict;
- present a talk on ethics consultation in rural hospitals;
- describe the ethical concerns of patients and families, concerns that those doing ethics consults should be aware of and address; and
- explain WVNEC’s tertiary ethics consultation approach in which ethicists from the WVU Center for Health Ethics and Law assist staff in hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, and home health to address ethical issues and contribute to their resolution in patient care.
The goal is to better prepare symposium attendees to perform ethics consultation in their health care setting. The target audience for this symposium is physicians, advanced practice nurses, physician assistants, nurses, social workers, chaplains, attorneys, and others who have an interest in this topic.
2024-2025 WVNEC Noon Webinar Series
Let’s start with good news! Continuing education credits for this series are free through a grant from the CAMC Foundation! This year’s WVNEC webinar series is once again brought to you in collaboration with the Charleston Area Medical Center’s Geriatrics Lunch and Learn Series. For those who provide ethics consultation or give ethics advice, the cases for the 2024-2025 WVNEC webinar series are timely and relevant.
They cover a discussion of frequent clinical, ethical, and legal questions that arise in patient care for incapacitated patients including…
1) making decisions with the Medical Power of Attorney (MPOA) representatives when there is conflict between them and what to do when the MPOA representative is not authorized to change the POST form, but the patient’s condition has deteriorated;
2) evaluating patients for abuse and neglect, and the Adult Protective Servies procedure for removing a family member as health care surrogate and agreeing to assume that responsibility;
3) responding to a special directive, “shock me up to 5 times,” that is determined to be outside the standard of care;
4) deciding how to proceed when the death of a patient who donated his body to the Human Gift Registry but then was not eligible to be used raises questions about the authority of the MPOA representative, the reasons why a Human Gift Registry may not accept a patient’s body even though the proper documentation was completed, and the value of writing funeral arrangements in a MPOA; and
5) paying attention to psychosocial spiritual issues and using excellent interpersonal communication skills to respond to a family’s request for medically ineffective treatment when having a good policy was not enough.
For more information on these programs, call Linda McMillen at 1-304-293-7618.