Certification and evaluation of the clinical ethics consultant. A proposal for Italy Mario Picozzi, Alessandra Gasparetto, Federico Nicoli and Renzo Pegoraro [PDF - 67.59 kbytes]

摘要

Clinical ethics, as a sub-discipline of bioethics, is subject to growing professionalizationin North America, Europe and elsewhere. Since the goal of clinical ethics is the identification,analysis and resolution of ethical dilemmas and conflicts in health care settings,specific competencies for practitioners and criteria to evaluate them are strongly needed.Regarding clinical ethics consultation (CEC) many efforts have been made by Americanclinical ethicists and scholars to delineate the core knowledge and skills to perform it,to settle specific professional responsibilities and tasks and to identify the fundamentaltraining and quality requirements that candidates and actual professionals should satisfyin order to serve as ethics consultants. Starting from the analysis of two meaningful internationalexperiences, the one American and the other German, the paper discusses theprocess of certification of the clinical ethics consultant and encourages its implementationin the Italian context trying to outline a model which is suited to it.