Ethics committees are usually multidisciplinary and serve which purposes?

• A. Education, policy recommendation, and case consultation
• B. Clinical trials oversight
• C. Staff scheduling
• D. Marketing

Answer: (A)

Ethics committees are multidisciplinary to bring together diverse perspectives from clinicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, lawyers, and administrators so they can address a wide range of ethical issues in patient care and policy. Their roles include educating staff and patients about ethical concepts and dilemmas, advising on and helping to develop ethical policies and procedures for the institution, and providing case consultations to support teams facing ethically challenging decisions for individual patients. Marketing and staff scheduling aren’t aligned with this purpose, as those are organizational or operational tasks. Oversight of clinical trials is typically handled by an Institutional Review Board that focuses on research ethics, not the routine clinical ethics consultations these committees provide. So education, policy guidance, and case consultations capture the usual purposes.