Entwicklung und Aufbau Klinischer Ethikkomitees in den Krankenhäusern der Malteser Trägergesellschaft

Abstract

Health care ethics committees (HECs) are a fairly recent phenomenon in Germany. Until the 1990s, the only working committees were Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) at University Medical Centers and the state-based Councils of Physicians. In 1997, the Protestant and Catholic hospital foundations launched a joint initiative to develop and implement interdisciplinary HECs. Since then several public, private and church-based providers of health care services have started relevant projects, some of them aimed even at making HECs a prerequisite of hospital accreditation. This paper describes a training program for core groups of staff from all Maltese Order hospitals in Germany. These core groups are being trained to implement an HEC at their respective hospitals. The authors of the training program wrote it for practical use in health care organizations. It is based upon a two-layer model of implementing elements of clinical ethics in hospitals, in which the HEC is supplemented by interdisciplinary ethical case deliberations in the ward.