Events

Monthly discussion of clinical ethics issues

Diane E. Meier, MD, FACP, FAAHPM
Director, Center to Advance Palliative Care
Co-director, Patty and Jay Baker National Palliative Care Center
Professor, Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine
Catherine Gaisman Professor of Medical Ethics, Icahn School of Medicine of Mount Sinai

The essential principles of medical ethics are respect for the personhood or autonomy of our patients and the twin obligations to do no harm and to serve the good of the patient (nonmalificenceand beneficence). The typically narrow focus on disease treatment that characterizes care of the seriously ill in the U.S. often fails to honor these principles. Palliative care is organized around understanding the patient as a person, helping the patient to articulate what is most important to them in the context of the realities of the illness, and then developing and implementing a care plan that meets those goals.

Sharrona Pearl, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Medical Ethics
Drexel University

Both like and not like cosmetic surgery and whole organ transplants, facial allografts have proven difficult to categorize. This talk will show how bioethicists, surgeons, and journalists have conceptualized face transplants as neither and both, and the resulting stakes for each. Paying particular attention to the media coverage of Isabelle Dinoire’s partial facial allograft in 2005, Pearl will discuss the implications of the cosmetic frame and the whole organ frame for the bioethical debates around FAT.

Speakers including the Berman Institute’s Cynda Rushton and Jeremy Greene will address topics such as burnout and wellness among health care professionals, as well as discuss the erosion of the human relationship between provider and patient

As part of the Berman Institute of Bioethics’ 25th Anniversary, Dani Shapiro will read an excerpt from her New York Times best selling memoir, Inheritance, followed by a moderated conversation with Dr. Ruth Faden. After discussing the ethical dimensions of the issues raised by her memoir, there will be a Q&A with the diverse medical and academic community, and a reception to follow.

Healthcare architecture has strongly advocated for patient-centered design, but can the resulting concealment of clinical spaces devalue the role of medical professionals? With a recent paradigm shift towards design quality measurement, has the social responsibility of health architects changed? Obligations to develop an ethically-based framework to structure design decisions and allocation discussions in healthcare architecture are explored.

Brin Lecture
Dr. Joseph Fins

Prisons and jails in the United States have become de facto mental healthcare institutions. Approximately half of the 2.2 million incarcerated individuals have a mental disorder, and 20 percent have a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depressive disorder. Dr. Sisti will review the origins of this public health crisis and present findings from his team’s conceptual and empirical bioethics research. He will describe the ethical double-binds faced by clinicians who work to provide high-quality behavioral healthcare to this vulnerable population and suggest policy remedies to meet these challenges.