Développement d’un comité d’éthique clinique dans un hôpital universitaire suisse

Abstract

Development of a clinical ethics committee in a Swiss university hospital Ethics consultations in hospitals are largely a product of the 1970s in the United States. In the early 1980s, a survey in the US showed that only one percent of the hospitals had at that time a functioning ethics committee, whereas ten years later, in the mid 1990s, an estimate indicates that a large majority, probably more than ninety percents of the large American hospitals had created such committees. These committees are beginning to proliferate also in Europe, with unequal success in different countries, and assuming different roles and modalities of functioning. In this article, we present these differences and we place in perspective some difficulties and concerns observed in the past years. We then analyze the development over almost fifteen years of the clinical ethics committee of the University Hospitals of Geneva (Switzerland) and compare its functioning with the published information on these instances.