Practical Ethics: Addressing the Real-Life Challenges Confronting Healthcare Professionals By Kathleen Kovarik

• Ethics committees can help with the thorny dilemmas
• Help patients & families as you develop new skills to take on ethical challenges
• Apply a variety of ethical decision-making tools – take home’s to build your toolkit!
• Explore legal outcomes in current cases & classic ethical cases
• How would you respond to the MOST challenging workplace-related ethical issues?
• Updates on ethical dilemmas arising from technological advances

Would you like to feel more comfortable when faced with ethical dilemmas in clinical situations, in your workplace, and in your everyday life? Would you like to help patients and families navigate the difficult seas of ethical decision-making with greater ease, or to make better decisions on workplace-related ethical issues that you personally encounter? This workshop will equip you with an Ethical Toolkit to use, whether guiding a patient/family in decisions about Advance Directives or making that heart-wrenching decision to discontinue mechanical ventilation for a loved one, or ensuring that your work environment upholds the highest ethical standards.

Past attendees have found learning from Kathleen Kovarik, PhD, RN, on these often challenging topics to be interesting, fun and engaging. Ride the wave of Kathleen’s passion for ethics, and enjoy the multi-faceted, interactive environment she creates that results in high-level learning. She will guide you deeper into understanding ethical decision-making and its practical application to the complex health-care situations that you face on a regular basis.

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OUTLINE

What are Your Values?

• Exploration of Foundational Beliefs/Values
• Values Exercise
• Sharpening Critical Thinking Skills

Health-Care Ethics

• Human Medical Experimentation and Evolution of Ethics
• Key Cases and Codes
  • Presidents Garfield and McKinley
  • Tuskegee Syphilis Study
  • Nuremburg Trials and Nuremburg Code
  • Declaration of Helsinki
  • The “God Committee” and Dialysis
• Recent Application of Ethical Decisions in the U.S.

Ethics Committees

• When is it Appropriate to Involve the Ethics Committee?
• Seeking Consultation: How To’s
• Understanding the Composition of Committees/Models

Ethical Foundations

• Ethical Viewpoints and Stances
  • Deontology versus Teleology
  • Objectivism versus Relativism
• Key Theories
  • Kantian Ethics
  • Natural Law
  • Utilitarianism
  • Rawlsian Ethics
  • Ethic of Care
  • Rights-Based Ethics
  • Communitarian Ethics

Ethical Principles

• Autonomy
• Beneficence
• Non-maleficence
• Veracity
• Fidelity
• Justice
• Respect for Persons

Ethical Decision-Making: A Toolkit for Practice

• Framing Ethical Questions and Problems
• Decision-Making Formats and Tools
  • The Four-Quadrant Approach
  • Bennett-Woods Eight Step Model

The Most Controversial Cases

• Classic, Precedent-Setting Cases
• Current Ethical Dilemmas and Recent Cases
  1. Living Wills, Advance Directives, DNRs and ANDs
  2. Cases Involving Personhood Definitions
  3. Issues of Informed Consent
• What are some of the Most Complex Cases You’ve Encountered?

Dealing with Ethical Dilemmas: Decision-Making Team Practice

• A Dilemma of Limited Resources: Hurricane Katrina and Mercy Hospital

Exercising Ethical Leadership

• Ethical Leadership in the Workplace
• Keeping Current on Ethical Issues
• Ethical Dilemmas on the Horizon: Advancing Technology
• Recent Research: A Sampler
• Educational Opportunities in
• Health-Care Ethics

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OBJECTIVES

1. Determine scenarios that benefit from ethics committee involvement.
2. Investigate ethical insights to clinical and workplace scenarios.
3. Apply a variety of ethical decision-making tools to analyze complex patient/family dilemmas.
4. Integrate knowledge from precedent-setting ethical cases into current decision-making.
5. Critique current ethical cases utilizing sound ethical principles.
6. Dissect potential ethical dilemmas arising from technological advances now and in the future.
7. Incorporate a variety of “ethical tools” into a practical, usable, and easily accessible ethical toolkit.

What is health?

In 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO)Trusted Source defined health with a phrase that modern authorities still apply.

“Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

In 1986, the WHOTrusted Source made further clarifications:

“A resource for everyday life, not the objective of living. Health is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities.”

This means that health is a resource to support an individual’s function in wider society, rather than an end in itself. A healthful lifestyle provides the means to lead a full life with meaning and purpose.

In 2009, researchers publishing inThe LancetTrusted Source defined health as the ability of a body to adapt to new threats and infirmities.

They base this definition on the idea that the past few decades have seen modern science take significant strides in the awareness of diseases by understanding how they work, discovering new ways to slow or stop them, and acknowledging that an absence of pathology may not be possible.

Practical Ethics: Addressing the Real-Life Challenges Confronting Healthcare Professionals By Kathleen Kovarik

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