EthicsLab

Health care professionals, patients and family members could all agree that patient wishes about their care are important and need to be respected. Why then, nationally, do only 30 percent of adults have an advance directive that documents those wishes? Given that statistic, how could the town of La Crosse, Wisconsin, achieve the surprising goal that 96% of people who die there have an advance directive or similar documentation…such a difference from the national average? Some wonder how to begin such a conversation while others ask what the best systems to put in place are? Yes, there are better tools, practices and systems that can help us.

Our guests in this episode include:

Bernard “Bud” Hammes, PhD, Executive Director, Respecting Choices, A Division of C-TAC Innovations

David Bailey, Physician ENT and Chief Medical Officer for Memorial Health in Lufkin, TX.

Kate (O’Rourke) DeBartolo, National Field Director, Institute for Healthcare Improvement at The Conversation Project

Suzanne Engelder, MSW, ASW, The Center for Advance Care Planning and Advocacy

Are there better ways to build and support a culture of clinical ethics in healthcare? What might that look like? What has worked and how could the ideas and tools offered be implemented? In the late 1990’s the idea was proposed, why not marry the work being done in health care ethics with quality improvement methodology. Would this type of “Thinking Differently” help us get traction and improve the systems and initiatives that clinical ethics tries to accomplish? These are some of the questions and issues that our guests will wrestle with as well as offering concrete examples and even practical solutions being tested today.

Our guests in this episode include:

Mark Repenshek, Sr. Director of Ethics, Ascension Health

Bob Strickland, Sr. Vice President Performance Management, Catholic Health Initiatives

Bob Scheri, Vice President Mission Integration, CHI Memorial

Deciding for another is difficult. One of the most challenging ethical issues faced in clinical practice today is deciding for unrepresented patients – patients who have no advance directive or no family and  friends who can make decisions on behalf of the patient (surrogate decision makers) when the patient cannot speak for themselves. The moral distress of clinicians can run high especially given the diverse and complex national legal environment surrounding these patients. Our expert clinical and legal guests, experienced in the daily life of the healthcare environment, will offer insight into these challenges and offer both an overview and practical solutions being tested today.

Our guests in this episode include:

Dr. Bethany Kapp, Board certified physician in Emergency Medicine and Palliative Care, Franciscan Health System, Tacoma, Washington.

David Vukadinovich, Deputy General Counsel, CommonSpirit Health, CA

Lori Dangberg, Alliance of Catholic Health Care, Sacramento, CA

Thaddeus Mason Pope, Health Law Professor, Mitchell Hamline School of Law, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Jackie Glover, Professor of Pediatrics at The Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado

Human Trafficking is an egregious form of exploitation of vulnerable individuals by for the personal gain of the captor. We are very pleased to have five very experienced guests who bring a great diversity of expertise on this issue. We will be speaking to these guests with a particular point of view…we want to understand what their experience has been like, what their dilemmas and challenges have been on three levels:

The individual encounters with trafficked persons as patients,

Improving our organizational capacity to respond to human trafficking, and,

Responding within some of the societal challenges surrounding this issue.

This issues demands response whether we are inspired by our professional ethics to “do no harm” or we are inspired by the heritage of Catholic health care, to reach out to the most vulnerable with mercy – mercy defined as the ability to enter into the chaos of another.

Our guests in this episode are:

Kimberly Williams, Human Trafficking Project Coordinator at CHI Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center, Houston, Texas.

Mollie Gordon, Psychiatry, Harris Health System, Ben Taub General Hospital, Houston, Texas.

Marissa Castellanos Human Trafficking Program Director, Catholic Charities of Louisville, University of Kentucky,

Olivia Mittel, Pediatrics, University of Louisville, Lousiville, Kentucky.

Laura Krausa, System Director, Advocacy, Catholic Health Initiatives

Tune in to this latest episode of the EthicsLab podcast. In this episode we talk with international leaders in ethics about the future of healthcare ethics. In this episode we talk with international ethics leaders about the future of health care ethics. We traded stories of events that convinced us that we need to change, that what we had done in the past cannot be the way we continue in the future.

Our guests in this episode include:

James Corbett, SVP of Community health Improvement and Values Integration at Centura Health

Millie Solomon, President of The Hastings Center and Professor of Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School

Amy Haddad, President of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and Director of Creighton University’s Center for Health Policy and Ethics

Christy Simpson, Head of the Department of Bioethics at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia Canada and President of the Canadian Bioethics Society