bioethics and humanities core competencies

Ethics consultation has become an integral part of the fabric of U.S. health care delivery. This article summarizes the second edition of the Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation report of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. The core knowledge and skills competencies identified in the first edition of Core Competencies have been adopted by various ethics consultation services and education programs, providing evidence of their endorsement as health care ethics consultation (HCEC) standards...

Early on in the development of Practicing Healthcare Ethicists Exploring Professionalization (PHEEP), the founding members recognized the need to address and meet two important goals: (1) the creation of a dynamic, rigorous process to support the exploratory work, and (2) the establishment of the means--deliberative engagement--to generate and justify the substantive content of professionalization-related products, such as practice standards and position statements. Drawing from social justice and deliberative democracy conceptions and insights (among others), the authors identify and describe the core elements of the "process scaffolding" and "deliberative means" that inform PHEEP's deliberative engagement methodology...

As ethics services have become more integrated into healthcare organizations, the controversy regarding the possible professionalization of healthcare ethics practices has re-emerged. Some of the debate focuses on whether healthcare ethics practice possesses the attributes of a 'true profession.' This study examines the history of the professions and the relevance of this historical material, as well as sociological insights, for contemporary concerns. It explores whether the mismatch between traditional models of professional knowledge and the knowledge foundation for healthcare ethics is at the core of these concerns...

In "Consensus, Clinical Decision Making, and Unsettled Cases:' David M. Adams and William J.Winslade' make multiple references to both editions of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation in their discussion of two assumptions that are supposed to be at the heart of the facilitated consensus model's inability to handle unsettled cases; that is, that: 1. Consultants "should maintain a kind of moral impartiality or neutrality throughout the process," "explicitly condemn[ing] anything resembling a substantive 'ethics' recommendation, and 2...

This article critically examines, from the perspective of a Roman Catholic Healthcare ethicist, the second edition of the Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation report recently published by the American Society for Humanities and Bioethics. The question is posed: can the competencies identified in the report serve as the core competencies for Roman Catholic ethical consultants and consultation services? I answer in the negative. This incongruence stems from divergent concepts of what it means to do ethics consultation, a divergence that is rooted in each perspective's very different visions of autonomy...

The American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities (ASBH) issued its Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation just as it is becoming ever clearer that secular ethics is intractably plural and without foundations in any reality that is not a social-historical construction (ASBH Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation, 2nd edn. American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, Glenview, IL, 2011). Core Competencies fails to recognize that the ethics of health care ethics consultants is not ethics in the usual sense of a morally canonical ethics...

The passage from a posture of clinician to that of clinician-bioethicist poses significant challenges for health professionals, most notably with regards to theoretical or epistemological views of complex ethical impasses encountered in clinical settings. Apprehending these situations from the only clinical perspective of the nurse or the doctor, for example, can be very unproductive to help solve this kind of situation and certainly poses great limits to the role of the clinician-bioethicist. Drawing on my own experience as a former nurse who, following graduate studies in bioethics has begun providing ethics consultation services, I argue that clinicians must undergo an epistemological transformation in order to become clinician-bioethicists...

AIM: To review critically the traditional concept of autonomy, propose an alternative relational interpretation of autonomy, and discuss how this would operate in identifying and addressing ethical issues that arise in the context of nursing home care for older adults. BACKGROUND: Respect for patient autonomy has been the cornerstone of clinical bioethics for several decades. Important though this principle is, there is debate on how to interpret the core concept of autonomy...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: This update reviews the concepts underlying ethical issues in various contexts and countries, highlighting the evolution in the use of the core values underpinning the field and practice of bioethics as applied to healthcare. RECENT FINDINGS: It stresses the specific position of the adolescent as being a unique individual searching for autonomy and, most of the time, being competent to make decisions regarding the adolescent's own health. It briefly outlines the principles of a 'deliberative' approach in which the practitioner, while keeping in mind the legal context of the country where the practitioner is working, assesses to what extent the adolescent can be considered as competent, and then discusses with the adolescent the medical and psychosocial aspects of the various actions to be taken in a situation, as well as the basic ethical values linked with each of the various options available...

Departing from a contemporary novel about a boy who is going to die from leukaemia, this article shows how the dimension of time can be seen as a morally relevant category that bridges both 'dramatic' issues, which constitute the dominant focus of bioethical decision making, and 'undramatic' issues, which characterize the lived experience of patients, relatives and health care workers. The moral task of comparing the various time dimensions of a given situation is explained as an act of 'synchronizing' the clocks...

Although bioethics societies are developing standards for clinical ethicists and a code of ethics, they have been castigated in this journal as "a moral, if not an ethics, disaster" for not having completed this task. Compared with the development of codes of ethics and educational standards in law and medicine, however, the pace of professionalization in bioethics appears appropriate. Assessed by this metric, none of the charges leveled against bioethics are justified. The specific charges leveled against the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) and its Core Competencies report are analyzed and rejected as artifacts of an ahistoric conception of the stages by which organizations professionalize...

The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, is holding a series of 5 workshops to examine the controversies surrounding the use of medication to treat emotional and behavioral disturbances in children. These workshops bring together clinicians, researchers, scholars, and advocates with diverse perspectives and from diverse fields. Our first commentary in CAPMH, which grew out of our first workshop, explained our method and explored the controversies in general. This commentary, which grows out of our second workshop, explains why informed people can disagree about ADHD diagnosis and treatment...

The purpose of this report is to provide a concrete overview of the ideal standards of behavior and professional practice to which pediatricians should aspire and by which students and residents can be evaluated. Recognizing that the ideal is not always achievable in the practical sense, this document details the key components of professionalism in pediatric practice with an emphasis on core professional values for which pediatricians should strive and that will serve as a moral compass needed to provide quality care for children and their families...

Both American and Canadian residency accreditation bodies have formal requirements in core competencies that include training in ethics and professionalism without prescribing content. A structured seminar series in medical ethics and professionalism relating to dermatology practice was started at Brown Medical School's dermatology residency in 2001. Methods of instruction include discussion groups, review of medical and lay literature, book review, didactic teaching, case presentation, and informal e-mail exchange...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

1. Historically, medical ethics focused on the proper conduct of physicians as members of a profession. 2. Bioethics has emerged as a distinct field over the past several decades and has a broader scope than traditional medical ethics. The field of bioethics includes research ethics, public health ethics, organizational ethics, and clinical ethics. 3. Several factors contributed to the emergence of bioethics, helping to shape it, including the following: abuses of human subjects in research; advances in medical therapeutics and medical technology; and complex societal changes...

In medicine, and especially in medical school education, there is growing interest in and emphasis on professionalism, humanism, and clinical bioethics, as reflected in the Medical School Objectives Project of the American Association of Medical Colleges and the core competencies developed by the American Committee for Graduate Medical Education and the American Board of Medical Specialties. The authors first discuss the reasons for the increasing emphasis on this area. They then discuss specific areas related to professionalism, humanism, and clinical bioethics where psychiatrists are especially well fitted to play a role because of their training and experience...

OBJECTIVE: This article briefly reviews the history of the relationship between psychiatry and the leadership of ethics committees as a background for examining appropriate educational initiatives to adequately prepare residents and early career psychiatrists to serve as leaders of ethics committees. METHOD: A Medline review of literature on psychiatry and ethics committees and consultation as well as recent survey data from the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine indicate that psychosomatic medicine psychiatrists are particularly qualified and interested in serving as chairs of ethics committees...

The hypothesis that values change and evolve is examined by this paper. The discussion is based on a series of examples where, over a period of a few decades, new ethical issues have arisen and values have changed. From this analysis it is suggested that there are a series of core values around which most people would agree. These are unlikely to change over long time periods. There are then a series of secondary or derived values around which there is much more controversy and within which differences of view occur...

Biomedical research is a perennially controversial subject. While the provisions of the Revised Declaration of Helsinki enjoy world-wide acceptance, they are increasingly placed in question--not least by the Council of Europe's Bioethics Convention, which allows non-therapeutic research in restricted cases on those incapable of giving informed consent. Taking as its starting-point the fundamental conflict between the general interest in research and the individual interests of the patients concerned, this article analyses the conditions under which medical experimentation on human beings is permissible...