Assessing clinical ethics consultation: processes and outcomes

The vast majority of hospitals use clinical ethics consultation (CEC) as a service to address ethical issues in patient care. Both proponents and critics alike recognize a need to evaluate CEC. I review three outcomes of CEC that have been formally evaluated: healthcare cost, clinical indicators in the intensive care unit, and user satisfaction. These outcome indicators cannot be used to evaluate the worth of CEC because they are contingent and outside of the consultant's control. However, the failure of outcomes-based assessment poses no threat to CEC since the service is continually justified by the fundamental necessity of resolving ethical problems in patient care. While outcome indicators can be used as heuristics to investigate quality issues in CEC, process indicators can capture the quality of CEC more directly. Therefore, further research should be directed toward developing process-based conceptual models for CEC and various methods for assessing these processes.