Restraint Practices in Incapable Wandering Patients During COVID-19: Ethics and Best Practice Recommendations.

Patients who wander as one of their psychological and behavioural symptoms of dementia are often unable to follow or recall Infection Prevention and Control precautions, putting them at risk of contracting or spreading COVID-19. Physical and chemical restraints have been used to limit the risk of transmission to wandering patients and their care providers, but restraints are not the standard of care for wandering behaviour in non-pandemic scenarios. Although provincial policies on restraint use are available, their guidance may not provide the context-dependent information necessary for individual patient decisions.

Ethics consultation in paediatric and adult emergency departments: an assessment of clinical, ethical, learning and resource needs.

Objective: We sought to understand ethics and education needs of emergency nurses and physicians in paediatric and adult emergency departments (EDs) in order to build ethics capacity and provide a foundation for the development of an ethics education programme.

Methods: This was a prospective cross-sectional survey of all staff nurses and physicians in three tertiary care EDs. The survey tool, called Clinical Ethics Needs Assessment Survey, was pilot tested on a similar target audience for question content and clarity.

Implementing a clinical ethics needs assessment survey: results of a pilot study (part 2 of 2).

This paper details the implementation of the Clinical Ethics Needs Assessment Survey (CENAS) through a pilot study in five units within Hamilton Health Sciences. We describe how these pilot sites were selected, how we implemented the survey, the significant results and our interpretation of the findings. The primary goal of this paper is to share our experiences using this tool, specifically the challenges we encountered conducting a staff ethics needs assessment across different units in a large teaching hospital, and the facilitators to our success.