Bulgaria at the onset of clinical ethics consultation

Over the years, Bulgarian bioethics has been mainly an academic enterprise and fallen short of providing health professionals with skills for ethical decision-making. Clinical ethics support (CES) was piloted by the author through two bottom-up models - METAP (Modular, Ethical, Treatment, Allocation of resources, Process) and MCD (Moral Case Deliberation).

This paper aims to present and analyse developments in the area of clinical ethics and the first experiences in CES in Bulgaria.

The project reported here included a review of relevant literature on CES methods and evaluation and a documentary review of data from two CES pilot projects: METAP and MCD.

Most of the 69 METAP ethics meetings reviewed were first time meetings (88,4%); the average duration was 36 min and the average number of participants was four (44,9%). The meetings were organized in response to cases of severely or critically ill patients. The ethical dilemmas included choice of treatment (31,9%) and conflicts with the patient or their relatives (23,2%). Consensus was achieved in 34,8% of the cases. The situation was clarified with the patient (27,5%) and within the team (15,9%). The rights and obligations of both sides were discussed in 7,2% of the cases. The experience of the members of the Bulgarian Association of Bioethics and Clinical Ethics (BABCE) with MCD was also presented to justify the inference about the applicability of the two CES models in a Bulgarian context.

Among Eastern European countries Bulgaria has made progress in CES. Both METAP and MCD have been found to be useful methods.