Ethics Committee Appointment;Selecting an Ethics Committee Member; Your committee is made up of seven members: an orthopedic surgeon, a heart surgeon, a trauma nurse, an internal medicine doctor (the only female), a hospital chaplain, an ob-gyn, and a nur

You are the chair of the ethics committee at St. Jasper Regional, a regional hospital with a growing research program. Your ethics committee fills four major roles for the hospital: drafting ethics policy for the entire institution, organizing ethics education, reviewing potential conflicts of interested with industry that physicians have declared, and mediating the approximate 15 ethics consultation cases that come before the committee each year. Your committee is made up of seven members: an orthopedic surgeon, a heart surgeon, a trauma nurse, an internal medicine doctor (the only female), a hospital chaplain, an ob-gyn, and a nurse anesthetist. Every year an old member of the Ethics Committee rotates off and a new member joins. The departing member of the Ethics Committee is the female member, the internal medicine doctor. She had served on the committee for five years (the maximum term for a member) and was very wellregarded for her advocacy of patient rights and her ability to work well with others, especially her respect for people with views that differed from her own. She also had prior ethics committee experience at another institution and had taken several courses in clinical ethics in the past.