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The reception and implementation of ethical guidelines of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences in medical and nursing practice.

Swiss Med Wkly. 2010 Jan 26;

Authors: Pfister E, Biller-Adorno N

QUESTIONS UNDER STUDY: We conducted a survey among Swiss health care professionals on the reception and implementation of a number of selected ethical guidelines of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS). The following guidelines were chosen for evaluation: "Care of patients at the end of life", "Palliative care", "Borderline questions in intensive-care medicine" and "The determination of death in the context of organ transplantation". METHODS: Anonymous questionnaires were sent to 1933 physicians (general practitioners and internists) and nurses, randomly chosen from address lists of the relevant professional associations. We conducted a statistical analysis using SPSS 16.0. RESULTS: The response rate was 43.1%. 16.3% of the responding physicians had never heard of the guideline "Care of patients at the end of life", 30.5% had already heard of them, 34.1% knew some of their contents and 19.1% were familiar with the complete content of the guideline. 60.5% of those physicians and 56.0% of those nurses who had at least heard of this guideline utilised it in clinical practice. The guidelines "Palliative care" and "Borderline questions in intensive-care medicine" yielded similar results. By contrast, only 0.5% of responding physicians reported never having heard of the guideline "The determination of death in the context of organ transplantation", 2.9% had already heard of it, 24.4% knew some of its contents and the vast majority of respondents (72.2%) considered themselves to be completely familiar with the guideline. CONCLUSION: Knowledge of the evaluated guidelines is fairly widespread among Swiss GPs, internists and nurses. The guidelines are utilised in clinical practice by the majority of those care providers who are aware of their existence. The guideline "The determination of death in the context of organ transplantation", as a legally binding document, is even better known and routinely implemented in medical practice.

PMID: 20104375 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

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