Het ‘Clinical Ethics Support Team’ van het Brugmann-ziekenhuis

Abstract

The ‘Clinical Ethics Support Team’ of the Brugmann Hospital Helping people to make decisions and reflect on ethically difficult situations (on a case-by-case basis) is not (any longer) a part of the mission of hospital ethics committees in Belgium. However, there is a real need for such a tool in the field. Driven by a multidisciplinary group of professionals, the Brugmann Hospital (Belgium) has set up a protocolized system to support healthcare teams experiencing ethical tensions in a given care situation. The Clinical Ethics Support Team (CEST) consists of healthcare professionals, non-healthcare professionals and patients, all of whom have been trained in the methodology. CEST can be called upon by any member of the institution, under certain conditions. In this context, CEST helps professionals to identify and disentangle the issues, values and principles at stake in a given situation so that they can see the decision-making process they are involved in more clearly and so that they can make choices in a more enlightened and peaceful manner. By virtue of its existence and the guidance it offers, CEST helps to make a critical and reflective professional culture effective, contributes to the roll-out of high-quality decision-making processes and makes it possible to offer more appropriate care thanks to the consistency and embeddedness of the guidance it aims to promote.