Weill Medical College of Cornell University

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Medical Ethics

Welcome to the Division of Medical Ethics. The Division seeks to discover how to provide the most ethical care to patients and research subjects, to share this knowledge with physicians, students, and researchers, and to create standards of ethical care. The Division of Medical Ethics is active in both the Departments of Medicine and Public Health. Within the Department of Medicine, the division’s main activities involve clinical care and education. Through the division’s clinical and educational initiatives, medical students acquire knowledge and skills that enable them to improve the health of their patients and the communities they serve. The Division offers a wealth of resources to the entire medical community, including providing curricular support for the Medical College, offering the ethics consultations service and serving as the Ethics Core of the Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC).

The theme of the Division of Medical Ethics Seminar Series for 2008-2009
is Science, Ethics and Society: Celebrating the Legacy of C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, 50 Years Later. All are welcome to attend.

Clinical Ethics

Clinical faculty members direct a clinical Ethics Consultation Service at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center to assist clinicians, patients, and their families in assessing and resolving ethical issues that arise from clinical practice. Since its inception, the Ethics Consultation Service has helped a greatly increasing number of patients and family members make complex and difficult decisions. In collaboration with Patient Services Administration, the Ethis Consultation Service is one of the busiest ethics consultation services in the country, working with about 200 patients a year. Joseph J. Fins, M.D., F.A.C.P., is Chair of the Ethics Committee and Director of Medical Ethics at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Elizabeth Nilson, M.D., F.A.C.P., is also a member of the Ethics Committee and devotes much of her time to the ethics consultation service. Dr. Nilson is also developing a widely usable high-quality tool for evaluating ethics consultations, in order to help standardize the process and make it more precise.

The most common ethical concerns for patients and families often center around end-of-life care, determination of capacity, and futility disputes. Sometimes conflicts arise when patients refuse treatment. A percentage of cases involve infants in the neonatal intensive care unit and pediatrics. The Ethics Consultation Service has an excellent track record in transforming irresolvable dilemmas into fixable problems. The Service works with colleagues in the Patient Services Administration to help elucidate the facts and issues, resolve misunderstandings and miscommunications, and resolve conflicts. In the great majority of cases, a consensus can be reached on goals of care.

For more information about the Division of Medical Ethics, please visit the website for the Department of Public Health.