Editors’ Note

We are pleased to publish the second issue of volume six of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics (NIB).

The narrative symposium in this issue looks at voluntary stopping eating and drinking (VSED). The narrative symposium editor, Thaddeus M. Pope, in concert with NIB’s editorial staff, wrote the call for stories and invited the commentators. The symposium offers personal stories from the viewpoint of patients’ families and clinicians who were involved in the VSED (voluntarily stopping eating and drinking) decisions and process. There are three commentary articles on these narratives by experts in philosophy, palliative care, and hospice medicine written by Mark Corbett; Paul T. Menzel; and Robert Horowitz, Bernard Sussman, and Timothy Quill.

The research article in this issue asks, how do we measure the quality of clinical ethics services in health care organizations? “A Qualitative Study of US Clinical Ethics Services: Objective and Outcomes” written by Leah McClimans, Geah Pressgrove, and James Rhea explore this topic by analyzing 19 interviews in clinical ethics. They found division among interviewees “in their emphasis of the kinds of objectives that are most important, . . . experts were concerned with the appropriateness of different proxy and direct measures.”

The case study, “Ethical Challenges in the Care of Inpatient with Morbid Obesity”, by Paul L. Schneider and Zhaoping Li, struggles with the question, how do clinicians and caregivers best handle morbidly obese patients during extended inpatient treatment? Three separate ethics committee calls were made about the care of this patient across several months. They found that “The care of inpatients with morbid obesity presents a unique set of practical and ethical challenges to health care personnel. A disciplined approach to ethical analysis using the Principles of Biomedical Ethics framework may be helpful in dealing with these challenges.”

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For a list of current Calls for Stories and Author Guidelines, please visit www.nibjournal.org.