Bioethics

Chair: Sonya Misra, MD 

The Bioethics Committee (BEC) aims to have physicians and other interested or relevant members of health care and ethic domans. BEC is comprised of physicians, nurses, religious leaders, and community members of Santa Clara County. Non-physician representatives from other disciplines will also welcome to join BEC. These would include bioethicists, social workers, clergy, representatives of the legal profession, as well as hospice leaders and other providers of end of life services.

If you are interested in joining BEC please email emily@sccma.org. The Committee will welcome guests to meetings that are open. If decision making is to be done or if privacy or confidentiality is a concern, these guests will be excused from the meeting.  If guests wish to become members of the Committee, they may apply to the Chair with a brief letter outlining their qualifications and reason for seeking membership. These will be reviewed by the Chair(s) and a determination will be made. All members will be required to attend at least 1 meeting a year. 

The following policies have been adopted by the SCCMA Bioethics Committee and may serve as a model for our member physicians to be utilized in establishing their own individual hospital policies.  They are the result of the Committee’s gathering of information from past policies, papers and current articles by experts in the respective fields, and established ethical principles.

These policies are provided by the SCCMA Bioethics Committee as a resource for hospital bioethics committees and do not represent community standards or mandates regarding medical practice.  That responsibility and duty, instead, lies with individual hospitals, medical boards and specialty societies.

Model Policy on Medically Ineffective Interventions (2022) 

Health Care Decisions for Incapacitated Patients Without Surrogates (Revised 2023)

The SCCMA Bioethics Committee updated a policy written in 2001. The new document, Health Care Decisions for Incapacitated Patients Without Surrogates: Revisions to the 2001 SCCMA Model Policy, is intended as guidance to provide procedural mechanisms whereby ethically and medically appropriate health care decisions can be made on behalf of adult persons who lack health care decision-making capacity and for whom no willing and able surrogate decision-maker can be identified.