Current Videos

Follow

• 

  The Brokering of Hope

  Katherine Brown-Saltzman

  Hope is an essential aspect of treatment. The provider of that hope has an ethical responsibility to broker it in such a way that it promotes truthfulness, informed consent, and realistic and appropriate goals. Katherine Brown-Saltzman illustrates how integrating hope, even when there are poor outcomes or at the end-of-life; can nurture a powerful relationship between the patient and clinicians that fosters wellbeing for all.

• 

  Finding Meaning in the Everyday Practice of Medicine: Reflections of a Geriatrician and Physician-Ethicist

  Marian Hodges

  Dr. Marian Hodges reflects on the major changes she has witnessed in the clinical and organizational setting at Providence over the last 30 years. As the practice of medicine becomes ever more challenging, she shares her reflections from virtue ethics and age-friendly care which can help caregivers endure and find meaning in patient care.

• 

  Special Situations That Agonize Us in Caring for the Elderly

  Marian Hodges

  In this interactive session, participants explore several unique situations that face clinicians and families in the care of aging patients that bring into tension the principles for respect of autonomy, beneficence, and professionalism/clinical integrity. Dr, Hodges describes how to balance core ethical prinicples to arrive at a care plan that can be both ethically justified and practically managed.

• 

  A Doctor's Strange Love or How I Learned to Manage Compassion Fatigue and Love the Hard Conversation

  Bob Macauley

  Robert Macauley, MD, FAAP, FAAHPM, describes his experiences as a pediatric palliative care physician and suggests some potentially unexpected takeaways for those who provide care to adults as well. Dr. Macauley addresses common causes of caregiver burnout and compassion fatigue as well as explore the related phenomena of moral constraints, moral uncertainty, and moral angst. Lastly, he identifies practical steps caregivers can take in the setting of renewed interest in fostering connection, resilience, and work satisfaction for overburdened clinicians.

• 

  Is Advace Care Planning Outdated, Misguided or Redeemable?

  Robert Macauley, Sara Kolmes, and Kayla Tabari House

  Much has been written and debated about advance care planning in the last 30 years. In this interactive dialogue, Dr. Macauley and ethicists at the Center for Health Care Ethics discuss the evolution of advance care planning, review recent criticisms about the paradigm, and suggest ways to make advance care planning more effective and relevant for patients and caregivers.

• 

  From AIDS and EBOLA to COVID-19

  Molly Osborne

  Dr. Osborne describes the evolution of pandemics, along with notable themes that have emerged, particularly as they relate to COVID-19. Using bioethical principles as a lens, she examines the complex ethical challenges that accompany pandemics, including the allocation of scarce resources and principles of equity in caring for these patients.

• 

  Graphic Medical Education, One ICU Doctor's Use of Comics to Humanize the Medical Experience

  Molly Osborne

  Drawing upon her own experience as a critical care physician and medical educator, Dr. Osborne discusses the important role comics can play in examining health and illness from the perspectives of the patient, the caregiver, and the provider. Participants are introduced to educational resources that can lead to improved communication and patient care.

• 

  Battle Forged: How the Military has Shaped Medicine

  Torree McGowan

  Dr. McGowan explores how the military has influenced medical practice, especially as it relates to trauma care and emergency medicine. Through this unique view into the history of medicine, participants learn the origins and development of certain medical interventions which can promote a better appreciation of the storied care clinicians provide to their patients.

• 

  The Forgotten Denouement, Writing to Finish Doctors Stories

  Torree McGowan

  Emergency physicians occupy a unique space in patient’s journeys. Often, they are at the height of the action. fragmented by transfers and critical illness, but rarely are party to the final outcomes of the case. Dr. McGowan explores the role of writing in combatting physician burnout and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) through creating greater engagement in her patients’ stories.

• 

  Bedless Psychiatry, Rebuilding Behavioral health Service Capacity

  Dominic Sisti

  The lack of a comprehensive continuum of care for mentally ill individuals—which should include hospitals for seriously mentally ill people—represents an injustice. Dr. Sisti will offer recommendations to increase bed capacity and to advance “conceptual parity”—where mental and physical health are indistinguishable as health care services and priorities.

• 

  Disability, Vulverability, and COVID-19

  Dominic Sisti

  Dr. Sisti discusses how considerations about intellectual, mental, and physical disabilities have entered into conversations around scoring for scarce resources and triage protocols. He explores how risk mitigation approaches and public health guidelines are possibly based on ableist calculations of risk and benefit, and have harmed individuals with serious mental illness and their families.

• 

  Cultivating the Medical Mind: An Interactive Exploration of Uncertainty

  Alexa Miller

  Building upon the lessons learned in the video "Looking with Uncertainty: Inquiries into Visual Art, Practices for Good Medicine", this mini-workshop introduces established approaches for managing and communicating about uncertainty in the clinical setting and invites participants to deploy those approaches in visual arts experiences.

• 

  Looking with Uncertainty, Inquiries into Visual Art

  Alexa Miller

  Many patient safety experts and High Reliability Organization champions harbor a concern about the way in which caregivers and leaders respond to uncertainty. Sharing insights from research and stories as a teacher and collaborator across the disciplines of art and medicine, Alexa Miller describes how the path to navigating uncertainty may be expedited and demystified in an unlikely place: arts experiences.

• 

  Cultural Variances in Bioethics: Differing Approaches to Common Clinical Dilemmas

  Daniel Tsai

  Daniel Fu-Chang Tsai, MD explores the idea of cultural variances through clinical case examples, and how different theories or understandings of the self and social orientation are relevant in these settings.

• 

  End-of-Life Decisions and Eastern Religious Perspectives: Exploring Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism

  Daniel Tsai

  Daniel Fu-Chang Tsai, MD explores common Eastern religious perspectives on end-of-life decision-making and examines basic relevant ethical implications on frequent end-of-life issues.

• 

  Improvisation and the Art of Medicine: Adaptable Skills for an Uncertain World

  Belinda Fu

  The practice of medicine is unpredictable. To practice compassionate, collaborative medicine, clinicians must constantly think on their feet in order to navigate difficult situations, and care for others while caring for themselves. Dr. Belinda Fu describes her experiences with Medical Improv as a physician, patient, and educator, and explains its power to improve communication skills through Experiential learning.

• 

  When the Family has Other Ideas: A Case Discussion of Shared Decision-Making

  Mark Kuczewski

  Clinicians worry that families may request treatments in ways that are not aligned with professional judgment or depart from evidence-based practices. These circumstances may make it challenging to provide a coherent plan of care. Dr. Kuczewski examines some typical cases and explores strategies to cope with such difficult provider-patient relationships.

• 

  Who is My Neighbor in Catholic Health Care? Caring for Undocumented Immigrants in Our Community

  Mark Kuczewski

  A variety of challenges have confronted providers over the years in caring for patients who are undocumented immigrants. Dr. Kuczewski considers a variety of issues affecting these patients and how the mission of health care providers, especially those in Catholic health care, can address the needs of our neighbors who are often the victims of widespread unjust treatment.

• 

  Do Everything, Responding to Requests for Futile and Potentially Inappropriate Treatments

  Douglas White

  Managing requests for potentially inappropriate treatment is deceptively complex and exposes unanswered questions about the boundaries of good medical practice in patients with advanced illness. This talk summarizes released guidelines from five major US and European critical care societies on how to respond to such requests and how to proceed in the face of intractable conflict.

• 

  Primary Palliative Care in the ICU: Barriers, advances, and unmet needs

  Douglas White

  There are well documented problems with clinician-family communication and support in ICUs, which may contribute to poor outcomes for patients and families. One general strategy to improve care is to improve the skills of the inter-professional ICU team to deliver primary palliative care. This presentation summarizes several efforts including a novel intervention recently tested in a large randomized clinical trial.

• 

  When They Can't 'Just Eat': Palliative Approaches and End-of-Life Considerations in Adults with Eating Disorders

  Jennifer Gaudiani

  Anorexia nervosa carries the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses. As a disease that, paradoxically, steals patients’ lives and values while simultaneously feeling right and precious to the patient, anorexia nervosa is a problem that always resists treatment. How, then, do we know when enough is enough?

• 

  An Interdisciplinary Approach to Managing Eating Disorders

  Jennifer L. Gaudiani

  Jennifer Gaudiani, MD, CEDS explores not only the vital roles of a care team managing patients with eating disorders, but also the detailed fundamentals of the medical complications in these cases.

• 

  What They Don’t Say: Non-verbal Patient Behavior and its Role in Medical Decision Making

  Ralf Jox

  Patients who lack decision-making capacity may display non-verbal behavior such as refusing eating or nursing care that can complicate the medical decision making process by the treating teams and surrogate decision makers. Such behavior is not only difficult to interpret, but also difficult to reconcile with standard ethical and legal criteria or directions contained in advance care planning. This presentation summarizes existing empirical evidence and discusses possible ethical approaches to this problem.

• 

  1,001 Ethical Issues with Voluntarily Stopping of Eating and Drinking

  Ralf J. Jox

  While the professional and public discussion has been focusing on assisted suicide for many years, another practice at the end of life has largely been neglected: voluntary stopping of eating and drinking (VSED). The latter is increasingly being advocated as a presumably more humane and ethically less problematic alternative to assisted suicide. Dr. Jox challenges this view in this presentation.

• 

  Responding to Cultural Diversity in Clinical Practice: Revisiting Core Ethical Principles using a Patient-Centered Approach

  Joseph Carrese

  Studies show that if inadequately addressed, cultural differences can result in conflict, misdiagnosis, poor adherence to medical advice, and sub-optimal patient outcomes. An ethically sound and patient-centered approach for responding to differences and diversity in clinical practice is presented and discussed.