Assessing Awareness and Implementation of a Recommendation for Surgical Innovation Committees: A Survey of Academic Institutions.

OBJECTIVE: In 2008, a Position Statement of the Society of University Surgeons (SUS) recommended the creation of institutional surgical innovation committees (SICs) to ensure appropriate oversight of surgical innovations. The purpose of this study was to determine the level of awareness of the position statement, and how innovations are handled in academic departments of surgery. METHODS: An electronic survey was designed to determine the level of awareness of the SUS recommendations among members of the Society of Surgical Chairs; the existence and characteristics of SICs; and alternative means of oversight of surgical innovations. RESULTS: The survey was distributed to 150 persons, and 65 (43%) surveys were returned; 84% reported their institution promoted innovative surgery as a strength, but 55% were unaware of the SUS recommendations; 23% reported that their institution has an SIC, and 20% said their institution has discussed or plans an SIC. Existing SICs have a median of 7 members; 57% reviewed 3 or fewer procedures in the prior year; and only 7% reviewed 10 or more. The majority of respondents reported alternative mechanisms of oversight, including morbidity/mortality conferences (88%), peer review (77%), and outcomes registries (51%). CONCLUSIONS: A minority of Surgery Department Chairs is aware of the SUS Position Statement. Although most reported surgical innovation was an institutional strength, only 23% had an SIC and most rely on other mechanisms of oversight. It is unclear whether academic surgical departments are committed to providing education and awareness of the appropriate development and implementation of surgical innovations.

[Hospital clinical ethics committees]. / Los comités hospitalarios de ética clínica.

The scientific and technological advances have been surprising, more in the two last decades, but they don't go united with to the ethical values of the medical professional practice, it has been totally escaped, specially when the biological subsistence, the maintenance of the life through apparatuses and the mechanisms that prolong the existence are who undergoes an alteration that until recently time was mortal shortly lapse. It is common listening that exist a crisis in the medical profession, but what really is it of human values, which as soon and taken into nowadays, actually professional account, which gives rise to a dehumanization towards the life, the health, the disease, the suffering and the death. The ideal of the doctor to give to service to the man in its life and health, as well to be conscious that the last biological process that must fulfill is the death, and when it appears, does not have considered as a actually professional failure. It has protect to the patient as the extreme cruelty therapeutic, that it has right a worthy death. It's taking to the birth of the hospital ethics committees, they have like function to analyze, to advise and to think about the ethical dilemmas that appear actually clinical or in the biomedical investigation. In 1982 in the UEA only 1% of its hospitals had a ethics committees; by 1988, it was 67% and the 100% in 2000. In Mexico the process of the formation by these committees begins, only in the Military Central Hospital, to count the ethics committee on 1983, also the Hospital no. 14 of the IMSS in Guadalajara, it works with regularity from 1995, with internal teaching of bioethic. The Secretariat of Health has asked the formation of the bioethical committees in each hospital, and order the it was be coordinated by the National Committee of Bioética. The integration of these committees is indispensable that their members have the knowledge necessary of bioética. The Mexican Society of Ortopedia, conscious of the responsibility that will have these Committees, presents/displays the following article, with the bioética commite and the support to this in other hospitable units.