Hospital staff forms ethics panel

If your mother is on her deathbed and has no living will, who decides what for her?

Dilemmas like this are the reason Whitman Hospital has recently created an ethics panel.

Staffers have faced a growing number of end-of-life issues which left lingering questions over the past years, said Chief Clinical Officer Danise Fowler.

“We really needed a place to take ethical questions,” Fowler said.

More than 20 hospital staff have met three times now to hash out the guidelines for their new Ethics Committee. A physician, a chaplain, and staff from departments all over the hospital are on the new committee.

They’ll meet once a month to see new cases and decide where their hospital stands on new state and national medical policies.

For example, the state last year passed I-1000, an initiative which gives patients and doctors the right to proceed with a physician-assisted suicide in cases where the patient is terminally ill.

“There are a host of [our] policies to be reviewed by the ethics committees to see if they are clear and up to date. That would be one of the policies we would be looking at,” Fowler said.

Hospital staff brought in a social worker from Pullman to talk about an ethics committee operating in Pullman.

One example of a case the committee could see is when a family member is dying and they have not left behind a will or advanced directive.

“The physician is working with the family and they have concerns about what would be best for mom or dad,” Fowler said.

While the position is voluntary, hospital staff on the committee are paid for their time spent dealing with committee-related issues.

The committee is still in search of a citizen at large in the community who would like to sit on the panel.