International access to clinical ethics consultation via telemedicine

[Extract] Clinical ethics consultation (CEC) is a service provided by clinical ethicists (or sometimes, clinical ethics committees) to enhance patient care by identifying, analyzing, and resolving ethics dilemmas in clinical settings. CEC has long been offered as part of health care services in the US, but it is less common in other countries, perhaps because of a lack of trained personnel due to limitations in the number of clinical ethics fellowships [4-6]. A result of this relative lack of clinical ethics training is that, in some parts of the world, CEC is either not available or it is performed by unskilled personnel.