Northwestern Events Calendar

Apr
30
2015

Why the Clinical Ethics We Teach Fails Patients - Autumn Fiester

recurring see all events in this series

When: Thursday, April 30, 2015
12:00 PM - 12:45 PM CT

Where: Robert H Lurie Medical Research Center, Searle Seminar Room, 303 E. Superior, Chicago, IL 60611 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Bryan Morrison   (312) 503-1927

Group: Medical Humanities & Bioethics Lunchtime Montgomery Lectures

Category: Academic

Description:

Autumn Fiester, PhD
Director of Education
Director, Penn Clinical Ethics Mediation Program
Faculty, Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy
Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Why the Clinical Ethics We Teach Fails Patients

The dominant paradigm used to teach clinical ethics in both undergraduate and graduate medical education is "principlist" in approach, based on the theory of principlism set out by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress. But when the theory is converted into method, this “Principlist Paradigm” functions in a way that undermines a nuanced assessment of clinical ethics issues and offers students and residents an inadequate tool for handling ethics dilemmas at the bedside, where most clinical ethics issues are resolved. The Principlist Paradigm operates like a short, over-simplified diagnostic check-list that scans for a handful of ethical considerations in clinical encounters and then makes its normative assessment based entirely on that reductive set of ethical concerns. Because the Principlist Paradigm detects only a limited range of moral considerations, the frequent result is a "false negative," in which the clinical situation appears to have no outstanding moral obligations when in fact others remain. The Principlist Paradigm under-trains clinicians for the difficult ethical dilemmas they face in practice. The author advocates a re-examination of this standard approach to teaching clinical ethics.

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