The Clinical Ethics Center at Memorial Medical Center was established
in 1995 in cooperation with the Department of Medical Humanities of Southern
Illinois University School of Medicine. The Clinical Ethics Center was
created in response to the increasing importance of ethics to the daily
work of the Medical Center. This importance is reflected in the steady
increase in requests for ethics consultations that the Human Values and
Ethics Committee has received, the increased emphasis on patient rights
in the Joint Commission's accreditation guidelines, and in the significant
structural changes health care is currently experiencing.
The Clinical Ethics Center provides education, consultation, research
and policy development in clinical ethics. Clinical ethics is a field
of study that focuses on decision-making in the health care setting, where
patients, families and health professionals often face difficult decisions
about medical treatments and patient care. These decisions may involve
moral values, religious beliefs, or professional duties and guidelines.
Clinical ethics offers ways to identify and weigh the values at stake
so that the individuals responsible for decisions can make good choices.
Ethical questions and concerns arise when the right thing to do is not
clear, or when disagreement exists about what is best for a patient.
The Clinical Ethics Center maintains a collection of key journals devoted
to biomedical ethics. Circulation of the journals is available to the
Human Values and Ethics Committee and others who have an interest in biomedical
ethics. Memorial Medical Center's Schnepp Professional Library and Southern
Illinois University School of Medicine's Medical Library are also available
to the faculty and staff of the Clinical Ethics Center in helping obtain
literature in biomedical ethics. Personnel include the director, the ethicist, two per diem ethicists, a fellow, the medical director and
a support individual.
The Clinical Ethics Center is located within Memorial Medical Center,
Room B-145 area.
