Ethics support for GPs: what should it look like?

INTRODUCTION: Ethics support services for hospital clinicians have become increasingly common globally but not as yet in New Zealand. However, an initiative to change this is gathering momentum. Its slogan 'Clinical ethics is everyone's business' indicates that the aim is to encompass all of health care, not just the hospital sector. General Practitioners (GPs) deal with ethical issues on a daily basis. These issues are often quite different from ethical issues in hospitals. To make future ethics support relevant for primary care, local GPs were interviewed to find out how they might envisage ethics support services that could be useful to them. METHODS: A focus group interview with six GPs and semi-structured individual interviews with three GPs were conducted. Questions included how they made decisions on ethical issues at present, what they perceived as obstacles to ethical reflection and decision-making, and what support might be helpful. FINDINGS: Three areas of ethics support were considered potentially useful: Formal ethics education during GP training, access to an ethicist for assistance with analysing an ethical issue, and professional guidance with structured ethics conversations in peer groups. CONCLUSION: The complex nature of general practice requires GPs to be well educated and supported for handling ethical issues. The findings from this study could serve as input to the development of ethics support services.