Bioethics Mediation

Bioethics Mediation offers stories about patients, families, and health care providers enmeshed in conflict as they wrestle with decisions about life and death. It provides guidance for those charged with supporting the patient's traditional and religious commitments and personal wishes. Today's medical system, without intervention, privileges those within shared cultures of communication and disadvantages those lacking power and position, such as immigrants, the poor, and nonprofessionals. This book gives clinical ethics consultants, palliative care providers, and physicians, nurses, and other medical staff the tools they need to understand and manage conflict while respecting the values of patients and family members. Conflicts come in different guises, and the key to successful resolution is early identification and intervention. Every bioethics mediator needs to be prepared with skills to listen, "level the playing field," identify individual interests, explore options, and help craft a "principled resolution" -- a consensus that identifies a plan aligned with accepted ethical principles, legal stipulations, and moral rules and that charts a clear course of future intervention. The organization of the book makes it ideal for teaching or as a handbook for the practitioner. It includes actual cases, modified to protect the privacy of patients, providers, and institutions; detailed case analyses; tools for step-by-step mediation; techniques for the mediator; sample chart notes; and a set of actual role plays with expert mediator and bioethics commentaries. The role plays include: - discharge planning for a dying patient - an at-risk pregnancy - HIV and postsurgical complications in the ICU - treatment for a dying adolescent - dialysis and multiple systems failure Expanded by two-thirds from the 2004 edition, the new edition features two new role plays, a new chapter on how to write chart notes, and a discussion of new understandings of the role of the clinical ethics consultant.

Mediation Ethics is a groundbreaking text that offers conflict resolution professionals a much-needed resource for traversing the often disorienting landscape of ethical decision making. Edited by mediation expert Ellen Waldman, the book is filled with illustrative case studies and authoritative commentaries by mediation specialists that offer insight for handling ethical challenges with clarity and deliberateness. Waldman begins with an introductory discussion on mediation's underlying values, its regulatory codes, and emerging models of practice. Subsequent chapters treat ethical dilemmas known to vex even the most experienced practitioner: power imbalance, conflicts of interest, confidentiality, attorney misconduct, cross-cultural conflict, and more. In each chapter, Waldman analyzes the competing values at stake and introduces a challenging case, which is followed by commentaries by leading mediation scholars who discuss how they would handle the case and why. Waldman concludes each chapter with a synthesis that interprets the commentators' points of agreement and explains how different operating premises lead to different visions of what an ethical mediator should do in a given case setting. Evaluative, facilitative, narrative, and transformative mediators are all represented. Together, the commentaries showcase the vast diversity that characterizes the field today and reveal the link between mediator philosophy, method, and process of ethical deliberation. Commentaries by Harold Abramson Phyllis Bernard John Bickerman Melissa Brodrick Dorothy J. Della Noce Dan Dozier Bill Eddy Susan Nauss Exon Gregory Firestone Dwight Golann Art Hinshaw Jeremy Lack Carol B. Liebman Lela P. Love Julie Macfarlane Carrie Menkel-Meadow Bruce E. Meyerson Michael Moffitt Forrest S. Mosten Jacqueline Nolan-Haley Bruce Pardy Charles Pou Mary Radford R. Wayne Thorpe John Winslade Roger Wolf Susan M. Yates

Since the 1990s, deliberative democracy has been the focus of increased scholarly attention, as well as the locus of initiatives intended to directly engage the public in matters of public concern. Geared to bringing the core tenets of public deliberation to bear onto different contexts within the public sphere, deliberative processes have been implemented in a range of forms, from citizens' juries to national issue forums, from deliberative opinion polls to participatory budgeting. Ever more frequently, public deliberation has also gained traction in the field of public bioethics. Seizing on their intrinsic dialogic nature, scholars have proposed to harness deliberative processes as a means to address moral disagreement in the public sphere, in order to manage the ensuing and often irreconcilable conflicts around topics of bioethical sensitivity that challenge contemporary liberal democracies. Building upon these premises, this volume aims to reconstruct the theoretical as well as empirical processes of cross-pollination between deliberative democracy and public bioethics.

Akira Akabayashi presents the first book to explore the conversation on bioethics that is taking place between scholars and practitioners from the East and West: the first book in the discipline of bioethics for the globalized world of the future. An international team of experts address emerging issues in bioethics, focus on new developments and their potential for change, and set the agenda for the future. Most studies in bioethics advocating East-West dialogue have either attempted cross-cultural comparisons or have proposed Eastern philosophical paradigms to counter Western ideas. The tacit premise of previous work on the East-West dialogue is therefore a strain of relativism. Simply maintaining a respectful distance from other cultures is no longer sufficient in this era of globalization. The time has come for active engagement among different cultural perspectives. The Future of Bioethics initiates discussion on bioethical issues that arise from new medical technologies such as regenerative medicine, enhancement, research ethics, and synthetic biology, and goes on to address challenging dilemmas that result from the globalization of social change, such as transplantation tourism, public health ethics, care in the aging society, and professionalism. The volume presents original work by leading researchers in the field, alongside that of promising new scholars; as such, it establishes not only a cross-cultural dialogue, but dialogue between researchers of different generations. The book is divided into two parts—the first on the progress of biomedical technologies and ethics, and the second on globalization and bioethics. Each part contains four sections on different topics, which feature a lead essay followed by a set of commentaries and further discussion.

Named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 byChoice! "[A] set of almost 70 essays, all well informed and many with attitude." Harold Shapiro, PhD Professor Emeritus and Professor of Economics and Public Affairs Princeton University, Former Chair, National Bioethics Advisory Board "This most noteworthy and authoritative collection of 67 essays...represents 'the Penn way of doing bioethics' ....The Penn Center is widely known for multidisciplinary scholarship that emphasizes empirical inquiry on bioethical issues coupled with practical application(s)....The book provides excellent coverage of...both classical topics (e.g., informed consent, infertility, eugenics) and emerging issues (e.g., cloning, nonprofessional caregiving, privacy of thought in the age of brain imaging). The contributors, including the three editors, are either well-established or emerging scholars. Each essay offers historical background, an overview of relevant issues, a conclusion, and a list of references....Summing Up: Highly recommended."--Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries "This well-written book addresses a wide-ranging assortment of traditional bioethics issues that persist in the field as well as contemporary bioethics concerns that have evolved with new technologies and medical advances. This is a great resource for scholars in bioethics as well as various other relevant disciplines concerned with bioethical issues." Score: 96, 4 stars--Doody's Medical Reviews The Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania is the internationally recognized leader in bioethical education and research. Its interdisciplinary faculty is drawn from the fields of medicine, law, nursing, education, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. Arthur L. Caplan, the Center's founding director, is recognized as one of the most influential experts in bioethics. He has authored numerous books and articles, and served as the Chair of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations on human cloning. The Penn Center's leading fellows, Autumn Fiester and Vardit Ravitsky, have combined their expertise with Dr. Caplan and over 80 other contributors to create The Penn Center Guide to Bioethics--the foremost authority on both traditional and cutting-edge bioethical issues. The Penn Guide navigates uncharted ethical terrains, undoubtedly shaping both academic and public discourses on the challenging controversies generated by new technologies, theories, and medical advances. This volume represents the Penn Center's distinct, pioneering approach to bioethics, one that emphasizes empirical treatment of bioethical issues, and the integration of bioethical scholarship with practical application. Learn what the Penn Center has to say about: Neuroethics and brain imaging: Is my mind mine? Choosing future people: reproductive technologies and identity Eugenics and survival of the fittest in the modern world Bioethics and national security Vaccination, abortion, nanotechnology, organ transplantation, end-of-life issues, and more The Penn Guide will be the definitive text for policy makers, health practitioners, researchers, and students. This book will also inform the general public, patients, and family members as they seek answers to the bioethical issues of the day.

How can dedicated ethics committees members fulfill their complex roles as moral analysts, policy reviewers, and clinical consultants? The Joint Commission (TJC) accredits and certifies more than 19,000 health care organizations in the United States, including hospitals, nursing homes, and home care agencies. Each organization must have a standing health care ethics committee to maintain its status. These interdisciplinary committees are composed of physicians, nurses, attorneys, ethicists, administrators, and interested citizens. Their main function is to review and provide resolutions for specific, individual patient care problems. Many of these committees are well meaning but may lack the information, experience, skills, and formal background in bioethics needed to adequately negotiate the complex ethical issues that arise in clinical and organizational settings. Handbook for Health Care Ethics Committees was the first book of its kind to address the myriad responsibilities faced by ethics committees, including education, case consultation, and policy development. Adopting an accessible tone and using a case study format, the authors explore serious issues involving informed consent and refusal, decision making and decisional capacity, truth telling, the end of life, palliative care, justice in and access to health care services, and organizational ethics. The authors have thoroughly updated the content and expanded their focus in the second edition to include ethics committees in other clinical settings, such as long-term care facilities, small community hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and hospices. They have added three new chapters that address reproduction, disability, and the special needs of the elder population, and they provide additional specialized policies and procedures on the book’s website. This guide is an essential resource for all health care ethics committee members.

This book offers a reflection on the central role that the ethics of informed consent plays in Rapid Tissue Donation (RTD). RTD is an advanced oncology procedure that involves the procurement, for research purposes, of “fresh” tissues within two to six hours of a cancer patient’s death. Since RTD involves the retrieval of tissues after death, and since the collected tissues are of great importance for medical research, the need for any form of informed consent to regulate this procedure has been questioned. This book argues for the necessity of informed consent to govern RTD, and it provides the reader with a bespoke informed consent process applicable to cancer patients. The analysis unfolds at the intersection between applied ethics, public health ethics, and clinical ethics, and it is informed by philosophical theories of informed consent and by the social implications of individual choices. By viewing medical issues relating to informed consent in oncology from an ethical perspective, the book combines philosophical analysis with discussion of concrete cancer-related issues. As a result, the book is suitable for readers interested in ethical reasoning as well as for those with a medical background. It contributes to contemporary research by offering an original analysis that relies on a rigorous philosophical approach to address innovative issues at the cutting edge of medical research and policy making.

This book sets the scene for the deliberations on ethics and its application to healthcare in the twenty-first century. The word ethics, in classical Greek, means the “beliefs of the people” the study of what is right and good in human conduct and the justification of such claims. Without a doubt this task is not simply about setting up a list of rights and wrongs. Rather, it is a discussion, a process that helps tease out the real issues and find and teach ethical solutions to complex practical problems. The centrality of the patient is of prime consideration in this book, and the health of the individual patient is the first consideration in the teaching considerations discussed. Applied ethics in healthcare may have lost sight of what traditional ethics was trying to accomplish: a good life for good people over a lifetime in society with others. We must put biomedical ethics into perspective and develop a truly comprehensive approach to health care ethics. On the practical level, we need structures integrating givers ethical perspectives. But, there seems to be a gap and significant perception differences among healthcare providers’ learning environments and actual professional situations. Hence, teaching ethics and healthcare providers values is important to bridge this gap.