Information about Clinical Ethics Consultation Services on US Hospital Websites

Making clinical ethics consultation (CEC) services available to patients and their family members is a best practice most hospitals in the United States claim to follow. However, patients and families often lack awareness of CEC and rarely request CEC services. One reason patients and families might underutilize CEC is they lack access to important information about hospitals' CEC services.

Since patients and families often use hospital websites to find information about services, we applied a standardized search protocol to characterize information about CEC services hospitals have published on their own websites or websites of their academic affiliates. Our sample included the top 100 general, adult hospitals in the US identified by Newsweek and Statista in their 2024 ranking of hospitals around the world.

We found 88 hospitals (88%) had information on their websites indicating availability of CEC services, with 79 (79%) indicating patients and families may request those services. Hospitals with websites indicating availability of CEC services often provided information about how to request CEC (77.3%), how CEC might benefit requesters (69.3%), and a specific phone number for making requests (58%). Other types of potentially important information appeared less often on the hospitals' websites, such as the names of people who provide CEC (27.3%), an email address for requesting CEC (20.5%), and whether and how the hospital charges for CEC (19.3%).

This study reveals both needed improvements and potential models of best practice related to providing information about CEC services for patients and families on the websites of leading hospitals in the United States. US hospitals have an opportunity to promote accessibility of CEC by improving the quality of information about CEC services on their websites.