The article by Gill and colleagues in this issue of the Journal (page 204)1 raises the issue of the ethics of clinical ethics services and, secondarily, their potential legal liability. Expressly or by implication, the article points to many difficulties and pitfalls of such services, and certainly raises more questions than it answers. But, in doing so, it reflects a necessary and valid function of ethics services: to help those who should make the decisions ask as many of the “right” (ie, ethically relevant) questions as possible. It is not the function of ethics services to make those decisions.

The authors make some important points. Variability in decisions or failure to reach consensus does not mean ethics consultations are pointless — it is as important to highlight moral differences as to resolve them. When conducted well, clinical ethics services can be a valuable hospital resource and a powerful, critical voice contributing to ethical practice.

“Doing ethics” is an exercise of power, and power must be exercised ethically. But simply a desire to do good is not sufficient to ensure that. Our goal of doing good can blind us to the harm that is also unavoidably inflicted, and sometimes that infliction is unethical.

Doing ethics is a matter of both substance and process. Questions that help to provide insights about process ethics include: Who should decide? On what basis? Using which procedures? For what purposes? One of my “process” concerns about the Acute Clinical Ethics Service (ACES) described by Gill et al is that the ACES team does not necessarily include a person trained in applied or practical ethics and, moreover, that the authors do not recognise the need for doing so. I also have substantive or principle-based ethical concerns. For example, their “organisational principles” do not make it clear that, when values conflict, the basic ethical and legal presumption governing decision-making is that the patient’s values should take priority, and therefore that contravening them must be fully justified. Rather, these principles instruct the ACES to consider “the facts of the case and the values and preferences of all stakeholders”. Most ethical issues involve a conflict of values, which means values must be prioritised when not all can be honoured. Justifying the breaches of values that result is the essence of doing ethics. An important function of a clinical ethics service is to provide such justification or to comment on that provided by others. This allows the clinical ethics service to fulfil its advisory role in individual cases, to establish precedents that can guide future decisions and to serve a teaching function within the healthcare institution as a whole.

However, my purpose here is to address the broader ethical issues underlying an ethics service rather than the ethical issues raised by the cases presented by Gill et al, with whose analysis and conclusions I do not necessarily agree.

Committee decisions, as compared with individual ones, can spread the responsibility. A committee can make a decision that no one person — in particular, no committee member — acting alone would make. In all the cases described by Gill et al, the issue was that of shortening life (by either withholding treatment or aborting a fetus), and the physicians doing that were morally reassured by the ACES’s involvement. Might that have allowed the “caring team” to implement decisions that their moral intuitions were indicating were unethical? While these decisions may have been ethical, we must always be aware that we ignore such intuitions at our ethical peril.

A clinical ethics service could be held legally liable if it failed to act as a reasonably competent committee. In a Quebec Superior Court case,2 the court held the ethics committee of a McGill teaching hospital liable for negligence in its review of the informed consent forms for a research protocol. The very remote risk of death was not disclosed. A subject in the research trial died from an anaphylactic shock reaction to the injection of a dye.

If the membership of an ethics service or committee is not reasonably constituted, it could give rise to a claim based on systems negligence for failure to establish a reasonably safe system for ethics review. Not having a trained ethicist as part of a service or committee, or at least available for ad-hoc consultation, raises this issue, although that absence may be able to be justified. Moreover, an ethics committee and a “single ethics expert” are not mutually exclusive alternatives, as often both are needed.

Ethics services or committees may have an obligation to report unethical and illegal actions. If they do not intervene at all, there may be no liability, but, having intervened, they may be liable for failure to take reasonable care when it is clear that that failure could result in harm to others.

The basic presumption concerning patients’ medical records is that they are subject to strict duties of privacy and confidentiality. Therefore, obtaining informed consent from the patient (or the legal representative of an incompetent patient) to consult the ethics committee is necessary. Acting without such consent would need to be justified. As presently drafted, the organisational principles outlined by Gill and colleagues could cause some confusion as to whether these rules apply. Once again, it should be made clear that, in situations in which values conflict, the basic presumption is that the patient’s values should take priority.

The relationship between an ethics consultation team and the hospital administration raises the issue of conflict of interest in those people who are both members of the ethics service and part of the hospital organisation. If their obligations or goals as members of a clinical ethics service could conflict with their duties as people holding hospital appointments, then there is such a conflict, whether or not in the particular circumstance a conflict arises in practice. Strong ethical sensitivity is required to identify and deal with such conflicts.

An assumption that people of good intention acting in good faith are competent ethics committee members — in particular, that they are, by virtue of those characteristics, sufficiently educated in ethics — is not valid. A recent US Institute of Medicine report3 has recommended that substantial resources be devoted to such education.

Gill and colleagues mention various schools of ethics that “may assist with the resolution of ethical conflicts”. These schools can be looked at as different “lenses” through which one can view a situation that raises ethical dilemmas. When all reflect back the same response, one can be reasonably certain that acting in that way is ethical. But when conflicting responses show up, difficulties arise. These difficulties usually reflect an irresolvable conflict of values. In such cases, it is very important to give the reasons (ie, justification) for giving priority to one value or set of values and thereby contravening another value or set of values. Indeed, providing such justification is the essence of “doing ethics”.

The article by Gill and colleagues raises some very important issues, and the cases they describe may raise substantial controversy in relation to healthcare ethics services. Certainly, if North American experience holds true in Australia, many doctors may feel, at least initially, that their professional autonomy is threatened by an ethics committee or even an ethicist. Many nurses, however, will see ethics committees and ethicists as empowering them to challenge doctors’ decisions that they believe are unethical. Junior members of the medical profession, especially students and residents, and a few of its leaders, will be the first to accept the benefits of properly constructed ethics consultation services and to promote their integration into the healthcare setting. As ethics services become more familiar, more people will recognise both their benefits and (as we should always keep in mind) their dangers. Like democracy, ethics committees and ethics consultations are not a perfect system, but they are better than the alternative of having no ethics consultation process at all.