Clinical Ethics Consultation for Patients Impacted by Incarceration: A Single Center Retrospective Review.

Health care professionals and patients impacted by incarceration face unique medical, legal, and ethical issues. The frequency and nature of ethics consultations for these patients are underexplored. This study aimed to characterize the primary ethical issue and contextual features of ethics consultations involving patients impacted by incarceration. We conducted a qualitative concept content analysis of ethics consultations involving patients impacted by incarceration and calculated descriptive statistics of demographics to compare these patients with the broader population of patients impacted by incarceration at a single institution from January 1, 2015, through June 30, 2022. We identified 37,184 patients impacted by incarceration (people currently or formerly incarcerated or whose surrogate decision-maker is incarcerated) at our institution. Most were White (70%) and non-Hispanic (88%); 51% were male, 49% female. Individuals impacted by incarceration comprised 3% (