Courses

Introduction to Bioethics
In today's modern society, we are faced with diverse values and never-ending demands for scarce resources. Many health-care providers are thus often forced to deal with one crisis after another. This session provides a brief overview of bioethics as a discipline, and utilizes experience from participants to explore how sound reasoning and coherent values can help us to engage in careful and advanced deliberations that will make it easier to handle new dilemmas.

The Role of Ethics in the Formation of Medical Laws
Laws and policies are closely related to morality, but they are not equivalent to it. Some actions could be morally acceptable, but yet prohibited on legal grounds and vise versa. Moral principles are useful for assessing already existing laws and they should motivate and guide their formation. This session explores how ethical reflections can help shape better medical laws.

Organizational Ethics
Organizational ethics is the intentional use of values to guide the decisions of a group and/or organization. But moving an organization as if it were an individual with a coherent set of values can be challenging and it requires people with character, knowledge, experience and tools to enhance and materialize the vision directed by the selected values. During this session, participants will be introduced to the various lenses by which individuals and groups approach organizational ethical issues and identify processes for organizations to make good decisions.

Resource Allocation and Public Policy
Pressure on the health care system, including rising costs driven by an aging population, increasing incidence of chronic disease, and the proliferation of expensive medical technologies coupled with the need to manage costs effectively, has important ethical dimensions that exacerbate interrelated concerns around patient safety and employment conditions for health care providers. In this session, participants will discover how ethics resources can aid in developing public and corporate policy as well as assist mid level health care leaders to manage resources over which they have direct control in ways that promote patient safety and reduce stress.

Medical Decision Making
This session provides a brief overview of the history of decision-making models, with particular attention on various meanings of paternalism, informed consent, competence, and shared decision-making. Utilizing examples from participants' experience, this session will explore the ethical dimensions and practical matters of medical decision-making in a culturally diverse society

Culture in Health Care: Caring for a Diverse Population
Cultural background plays a key role in a patient's, resident's, and family's values and preferences. It affects how one thinks about health-care goals, end-of-life care, involvement of family and others in decision making, meanings of life and death, etc. This session will discuss ethical issues involved in working with patients and residents from diverse cultural backgrounds. It will present strategies that can facilitate responsive care and foster effective communication in a multicultural health-care setting.

End of Life Care
Medicine is continually increasing its capacity to extend patients' life, but it cannot always restore functioning and well-being. In end-of-life situations, medical decisions become increasingly difficult because the expected utility and beneficence of interventions diminish and because death is often preceded by episodes of mental incapacites. Are advance directives a good way to extent patients' autonomy? Deciding when a patient dies is a difficult and controversial thing to do.

Moral Distress
This session explores the challenges and courage involved in taking action when one's ability to do what is right is constrained by structural barriers and intra/interpersonal conflict. It examines what happens when there is incoherence between one's options or actions, and explores practical strategies at individual, group, and organizational levels to implement ethical practice.

Facilitation and Case Consultation
This session will explore various models of ethics consultation present in health care today. Particular attention will be paid to the theoretical and practical workings of formal ethics consultation in both the clinical and organizational contexts. This will include highlighting the importance of communication competence and group facilitation.