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Complex Ethics Consultations: Cases that Haunt Us
Clinical ethicists encounter the most emotionally eviscerating medical cases possible. They struggle to facilitate resolutions founded on good reasoning embedded in compassionate care. This book fills the considerable gap between current texts and the continuing educational needs of those actually facing complex ethics consultations in hospital settings. 28 richly detailed cases explore the ethical reasoning, professional issues, and the emotional aspects of these impossibly difficult consultations. The cases are grouped together by theme to aid teaching, discussion and professional growth. The cases inform any reader who has a keen interest in the choices made in real-life medical dilemmas as well as the emotional cost to those who work to improve the situations. On a more advanced level, this book should be read by ethics committee members who participate in ethics consultations, individual ethics consultants, clinicians who seek education about complex clinical ethics cases, and bioethics students.
274 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 29, 2025
This is a book I read for work, but I did read it all the way through so wanted to briefly review it here. I currently work as a Clinical Ethicist at a medical system and help cover all the Ethics consults that come in for all our hospitals in the Charlotte region (one large hospital plus about 5 other smaller community hospitals). So the issues in this book are really what I deal with every single day. It covers everything from end of life issues, surrogate decision making issues, pediatric ethics issues, decisions regarding various surgical procedures, quality of life considerations, how cultural and religious issues intersect with medical decisions, and lots of other things.
This book is structured in a case study presentation style where various individual authors have written up cases that they have dealt with over the years, the story of what happened, the ethical issues they wrestled with, as well as some of the outcomes. As the title suggests, it specifically focuses on "Cases that Haunt Us", meaning particularly difficult cases or situations that they still think about years later. I really appreciated the narrative style, so it reads easily and doesn't feel like a textbook.
I think what I appreciated about this book the most is that it helped reassure me a bit that everyone else dealing with these types of situations is struggling with them just as much as I do. Often I come home at night and cannot stop thinking about whatever I've been dealing with at work, it's going over and over in my mind. The very fact that something has turned into an Ethics consult means there is no easy answer, so we're trying to figure out how best to help each patient but often times there's just no great options. This book helped me see how others have wrestled with similar situations and how they may or may not have resolved.
One drawback is that the book has aged a little bit. I think it was first published in 2008, and many of the authors were writing about cases that had happened years prior. So some of the context of how things are done in the hospital setting has changed a bit in the last few decades. In addition, some of these are referring specifically to hospital systems where ethics issues are handled specifically by a Ethics committee, whereas our hospital (like many other hospitals over recent decades) has moved more to having an ethics person like myself working directly within the hospital, and collaborating with other Clinical Ethicists, rather than having it handled by a larger committee. Either way, I definitely found this helpful.
This book is structured in a case study presentation style where various individual authors have written up cases that they have dealt with over the years, the story of what happened, the ethical issues they wrestled with, as well as some of the outcomes. As the title suggests, it specifically focuses on "Cases that Haunt Us", meaning particularly difficult cases or situations that they still think about years later. I really appreciated the narrative style, so it reads easily and doesn't feel like a textbook.
I think what I appreciated about this book the most is that it helped reassure me a bit that everyone else dealing with these types of situations is struggling with them just as much as I do. Often I come home at night and cannot stop thinking about whatever I've been dealing with at work, it's going over and over in my mind. The very fact that something has turned into an Ethics consult means there is no easy answer, so we're trying to figure out how best to help each patient but often times there's just no great options. This book helped me see how others have wrestled with similar situations and how they may or may not have resolved.
One drawback is that the book has aged a little bit. I think it was first published in 2008, and many of the authors were writing about cases that had happened years prior. So some of the context of how things are done in the hospital setting has changed a bit in the last few decades. In addition, some of these are referring specifically to hospital systems where ethics issues are handled specifically by a Ethics committee, whereas our hospital (like many other hospitals over recent decades) has moved more to having an ethics person like myself working directly within the hospital, and collaborating with other Clinical Ethicists, rather than having it handled by a larger committee. Either way, I definitely found this helpful.
April 7, 2009
Phil 472 Clinical Health Care Ethics
Good case studies. Helpful and challenging
Good case studies. Helpful and challenging
July 12, 2013
Helpful, not least because it's cathartic (as someone who deals with some of these issues from the bedside and spends too many hours ruminating about them).
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews