https://doi.org/10.4081/mem.2020.708
Legal accountability in Clinical Ethics Consultation
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Authors
The aim of this paper is to outline the framework for a critical reflection about legal accountability associated with Clinical Ethics Consultation (CEC). First of all, we will explain why we believe that, at the present time, in Italy, CEC provided by an individual Ethics Consultant shoud be considered the best format to guarantee a quality service to patients and healthcare professionals. We will then analyse whether and when an Ethics Consultant can be held liable for violation of a civil or criminal law. Finally, starting from the analysis of the jurisprudential evolution and the healthcare legislation reforms, we will propose a discipline applicable to the Ethics Consultant's activity in case of damage to a patient. According to this perspective, we will illustrate why the formal and juridical acknowledgement of the Ethics Consultant's activity can define the contents of his actual role in the care process while helping to spread the CEC culture as a dialogic process meant to effectively improve health care through the identification, analysis and resolution of ethical dilemmas in clinical practice.
How to Cite
PAGEPress has chosen to apply the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) to all manuscripts to be published.
An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:
- the author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
- a complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.