“Special” committee to exclude outsiders?

 

According to the mission statement for the ethics committee of the Children’s Hospital & Regional Medical Center, attached to the WPAS investigative report as the exhibit H, The membership is representative of the medical staff, other hospital health care providers, the Board of Trustees, and the community. Membership shall serve on a continuous basis subject to annual review and reappointment by the Medical Director and Chairman.

Note that the membership includes outsiders like representatives of other hospital health care providers and the community. They serve on a continuous basis year by year.

If the Ashley case was referred to and discussed in the hospital ethics committee as Dr. Diekema explains, the committee that discussed her case must have had the same membership as stated above. But as I quoted from the Salon.com article in my February 20 post How big was the special committee? , the committee that reviewed the Ashley case on May 5 in 2004 was made up of hospital and University of Washington Medical School employees. No other hospital health care providers. No representatives of the community. There were no outsiders, in short, in that particular meeting.

According to the Salon.com article, outsiders were omitted partly because of federal medical laws to protect patient privacy. But it sounds like a lame excuse. If outsiders have to be omitted from the committee discussion to protect patient privacy, the membership can never, in any case, include representative of other hospital health care providers or the community to begin with. Now the article writes “partly because of…….” So there were some other reasons that the article doesn’t refer to. Some other reasons, that have not been revealed as yet, for omitting outsiders from the discussions of this particular case.

I already pointed out in my February 14 post, Do we really know the facts?, that the ethics committee meeting that discussed the Ashley case on May 5, 2004 was titled the Special CHRMC Ethics Committee Meeting/Consultation according to the exhibit L of the WPAS report. It was a SPECIAL ethics committee. Not just a regular one.

What do these facts all mean? Do they suggest that the Special CHRMC Ethics Committee Meeting/Consultation on May 5, 2004 was not really a meeting of the “regular” hospital ethics committee that other cases are referred to? Was it an ad hoc meeting convened solely for this particular case, independent from the regular ethics committee described in the mission statement quoted above? Was it “special” because there was a need to exclude outsiders from this particular discussion? Was it “special” because there was something in the discussion that they didn’t want to go out of the room?  

Does this have anything to do with the fact that the case was kept private for as long as 2 years after the surgeries?