Toby Schonfeld

Guidance for healthcare ethics committees

Preface Part I. The Context of Healthcare Ethics Committee Work: 1. Introduction to healthcare ethics committees D. Micah Hester and Toby Schonfeld 2. Brief introduction to ethics and ethical theory D. Micah Hester and Toby Schonfeld 3. Ethics committees and the law Stephen Latham 4. Cultural and religious issues in health care Alissa Swota Part II. Consultation: 5. Mission, vision, goals: defining the parameters of the ethics consultation Marty Smith 6. Ethics consultation process Jeffrey Spike 7. Informed consent, shared decision making, and the ethics committee Randall Horton and Howard Brody 8. Decision-making capacity Art Derse 9. Family dynamics and surrogate decision making Lisa Soleymani Lehmann 10. Confidentiality Toby Schonfeld 11. Advance care planning and end-of-life decision making Nancy M. P. King and John Moskop 12. Medical futility Thaddeus Mason Pope 13. Ethical issues in reproduction Anne Drapkin Lyerly 14. Ethical issues in neonatology John Lantos 15. Ethical issues in pediatrics D. Micah Hester Part III. Policy Development and Organizational Issues: 16. Ethics committees and distributive justice Nancy Jecker 17. Developing effective ethics policy Anne Lederman Flamm 18. Implementing policy to the wider community Mary Faith Marshall and Joan Liaschenko 19. Ethics in and for the organization Mary Rorty Part IV. Educating Others: 20. The healthcare ethics committee as educator Kathy Kinlaw 21. Education as prevention Kayhan Parsi 22. Understanding ethics pedagogy Felicia Cohn Index.

A Comparison of Student Performance between Two Instructional Delivery Methods for a Healthcare Ethics Course

Healthcare ethics has become part of the standard curriculum of students in the health professions. The goals of healthcare ethics education are to give students the skills they need to identify, assess, and address ethical issues in clinical practice and to develop virtuous practitioners. Incorporating the medical humanities into medical school, for example, is intended to foster empathy and professionalism among students and to provide mechanisms for enhanced physician well-being. Yet, despite the long-standing inclusion of the humanities in nursing curricula, increases in the amount and kinds of scientific knowledge essential for clinical practice has resulted in the erosion of the “humanistic arts” from nursing education. One potential solution to this challenge comes with the increase in interprofessional education, where students in a variety of healthcare professions programs come together to learn about issues common to all healthcare fields.

Incorporating Spirituality into Health Sciences Education

Abstract Researchers are beginning to collect empiric data about coping mechanisms of health science students. Yet, there is an important aspect of coping with stress that is only partially addressed in health sciences curricula: students’ spiritual well-being. In this essay, we describe a course in spirituality and health care that we offered to fourth-year medical students, as well as a small empirical study we conducted to assess students’ spiritual needs and practices. We then offer reflections on the broad applicability of this work to students in the health sciences more generally, including suggestions for curriculum interventions that may ensure students’ success.

Connecting Certification and Education

In their article “Structuring a Written Examination to Assess ASBH Health Care Ethics Consultation Core Knowledge Competencies,” Bruce D. White, Jane B. Jankowski, and Wayne N. Shelton (2014) describe a process for developing and overseeing a written certification exam as part of the credentialing process for health care ethics consultations. Although they engage many salient points regarding the development and administration of two different written examination formats (i.e., single-answer multiplechoice and short answer/essay), we contend that they have overlooked or minimized several key issues, including the nature of the core competencies for consultants, the characterization of a “content expert” for exam construction, the difficulty of objectivity in scoring, and the costs of administering the exam. These issues present substantial barriers to creating an examination, and they must be addressed before moving toward implementing a certification exam.

Where Have All the Theologians Gone and Should We Lament Their Passing

team (Carnegie Foundation 2010). Furthermore, an objective and “arm’s length” approach that largely prioritizes cognitive analysis is insufficient for today’s health care environment and can result in clinical ethics consultations that are formulaic, rather than fully engaged in understanding the human and organizational complexities and nuances of the issues and solutions. Contemporary clinical ethics consultation has certainly been enriched by the contributions of diverse and courageous pioneers and the analytic tools that they brought to bioethics and the health care context. Models that fully engage the inherent relational context of clinical work, and that confront unconscious bias, power inequities, and persistent forms of disrespect, could help to propel the field forward rather than harness it to the past. A delicate mix of thoughtful cognitive analysis combined with intimately and mindfully stepping into the conundrums of clinical realities allows clinical ethics consultants to successfully address moral conflicts, dilemmas, and suffering. Nurses as ethics consultants can and often do have the knowledge and skills to do both. & REFERENCES

Dollars and Deadlines: Rule Reforms in Short Time Frames

Dollars and Deadlines: Rule Reforms in Short Time Frames Toby Schonfeld, Melinda Gormley & Daniel K. Nelson To cite this article: Toby Schonfeld, Melinda Gormley & Daniel K. Nelson (2017) Dollars and Deadlines: Rule Reforms in Short Time Frames, The American Journal of Bioethics, 17:7, 62-64, DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2017.1328533 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2017.1328533