Answers may include a review of ELICIT ANSWER(S): published literature, showing how many consultations are provided annually within similarly sized health care organizations that offer comparable services. CLICK to fly in the literature review sentence and READ it. SAY: Even if there is a specific performance requirement, benchmarks may indicate a more realistic starting point. Remember that the benchmark data must match the practice of interest; otherwise, you will be comparing apples to oranges. CLICK. Slide 12 NOTE: This slide is animated. SAY: The next factor to consider in setting an achievable goal is the seriousness of the ethics issue. Seriousness can be assessed by asking whether even 1 occurrence of a specific practice can be tolerated. For example, engaging in research on human subjects without a formal review and approval by the Institutional Review Board is a practice that should never happen and is comparable to a sentinel event in patient safety. Seriousness can also be assessed by asking yourself if you would be willing to publicly defend your proposed achievable goal. For instance, how would the public respond if the headlines of the local newspaper announced that your organization was going to strive to ensure that 65% of reportable adverse events that caused harm to patients are disclosed to the patients or the patients’ personal representatives? Implicit in such a statement is that adverse events would be concealed from 35% of patients. Can you defend this? Not every ethics issue rises to this level of gravity. For instance, how serious is it if every inpatient know doesn’t that the ethics consultation service is available to address their ethical concerns? In that case, a lower goal could likely be defended. As a rule of thumb, the higher the level of seriousness, the higher the achievable goal.
ELICIT ANSWER(S): Answers may include a review of published literature, showing how many consultations are provided annually within similarly sized health care organizations that offer comparable services. CLICK to fly in the literature review sentence and READ it. SAY: Even if there is a specific performance requirement, benchmarks may indicate a more realistic starting point. Remember that the benchmark data must match the practice of interest; otherwise, you will be comparing apples to oranges. CLICK. Slide 12 NOTE: This slide is animated. SAY: The next factor to consider in setting an achievable goal is the seriousness of the ethics issue. Seriousness can be assessed by asking whether even 1 occurrence of a specific practice can be tolerated. For example, engaging in research on human subjects without a formal review and approval by the Institutional Review Board is a practice that should never happen and is comparable to a sentinel event in patient safety. Seriousness can also be assessed by asking yourself if you would be willing to publicly defend your proposed achievable goal. For instance, how would the public respond if the headlines of the local newspaper announced that your organization was going to strive to ensure that 65% of reportable adverse events that caused harm to patients are disclosed to the patients or the patients’ personal representatives? Implicit in such a statement is that adverse events would be concealed from 35% of patients. Can you defend this? Not every ethics issue rises to this level of gravity. For instance, how serious is it if every inpatient doesn’t know that the ethics consultation service is available to address their ethical concerns? In that case, a lower goal could likely be defended. As a rule of thumb, the higher the level of seriousness, the higher the achievable goal.
PE_BtB_Mod5_FacultyGuide_final.docx