Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Ethics Committee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ethics Committee. Show all posts

Saturday, November 5, 2022

A guide to establishing ethics committees in behavioral health settings

Cox D. J. (2020). 
Behavior analysis in practice, 13(4), 939–949.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-020-00455-6

Abstract

Ethical statements typically involve rules. All rules can vary in accuracy and specificity depending on the context to which they are applied. Codes of ethics often involve ethical rules that are written generally to cover the wide-ranging set of possible situations any one member of the profession may encounter. But, despite being written generally, codes of ethics are applied to specific situations that professional members encounter. The application of general rules to specific contexts can sometimes be challenging and complex. Healthcare organizations have several options to help their employees behave ethically. One approach is to appoint a single ethics coordinator (Brodhead & Higbee, 2012). In contrast, the dominant approach in most healthcare organizations is to develop an organizational ethics committee (Moon, 2009). Despite the popularity of the ethics committee in other professions, it is unknown the extent to which organizations that provide ABA services have established and operate ethics committees. Ethics coordinator roles and ethics committees each have benefits and drawbacks. This article reviews the benefits and drawbacks of appointing an ethics coordinator and establishing an ethics committee. And, for interested organizations, this article outlines the steps and considerations that organizations can use to guide the creation of an ethics committee.

Conclusion 

Codes of ethics that guide helping professionals have to be written generally to cover the wide-ranging set of possible situations any one member of the profession may encounter. Despite being written generally, ethical guidelines are applied to specific situations that professional members encounter. The application of general rules to specific contexts can sometimes be challenging and complex (e.g., Bailey & Burch, 2011; Sush & Najdowski, 2019). Healthcare organizations can take several strategies to help their employees behave ethically. One approach is to appoint a single ethics coordinator (Brodhead & Higbee, 2012). In contrast, the dominant approach in most healthcare organizations is to develop an organizational ethics committee (Moon, 2019). Despite the popularity of the ethics committee in other professions, it is unknown the extent to which organizations that provide ABA services have established and operate ethics committees. For organizations interested in establishing an ethics committee, this article provided an overview of the steps that should likely be considered.

Thursday, April 16, 2020

How To Move From Data Privacy To Data Ethics

Photo:Thomas Walle
forbes.com
Originally posted 11 March 20


Here is an excerpt:

Data Ethics Is Up To Each And Every Company

Data ethics, however, is more nuanced and complicated. It's up to each company to decide what use cases their collected data should support or not. There are no federal or state laws related to data ethics, and there are no government-owned bodies that will penalize the ones that cross the ethical boundaries of how data should and should not be used.

However, in the growing data industry, which is composed of those helping companies and individuals to make better decisions, there’s a constant influx of new data being generated and collected, such as health data, car driving data and location data, to name a few. These data sets and insights are new to the market, and I believe we will start to see the first wave of forward-looking data companies taking a clear stance and drawing their own ethical guidelines.

These are companies that acknowledge the responsibility they have when holding such information and want to see it be used for the right use cases -- to make people’s lives better, easier and safer. So, if you agree that data ethics is important and want to be ahead of the curve, what is there to do?

Creating A Set Of Ethical Guidelines

My recommendation for any data company is to define a set of core ethical guidelines your company should adhere to. To accomplish this, follow these steps:

1. Define Your Guidelines

The guidelines should be created by inviting different parts of your organization to get a balanced and mixed view of what the company sees as acceptable use cases for its insights and data. In my experience, including different departments, such as commercial and engineering, people from different nationalities and all geographies, if your companies operate in multiple markets, is crucial in getting a nuanced and healthy view of what the company, its employees and stakeholders see as ethically acceptable.

The info is here.

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Create an Ethics Committee to Keep Your AI Initiative in Check

Steven Tiell
Harvard Business Review
Originally posted 15 Nov 19

Here is an excerpt:

Establishing this level of ethical governance is critical to helping executives mitigate downside risks, because addressing AI bias can be extremely complex. Data scientists and software engineers have biases just like everyone else, and when they allow these biases to creep into algorithms or the data sets used to train them — however unintentionally — it can leave those subjected to the AI feeling like they have been treated unfairly. But eliminating bias to make fair decisions is not a straightforward equation.

While many colloquial definitions of “bias” involve “fairness,” there is an important distinction between the two. Bias is a feature of statistical models, while fairness is a judgment against the values of a community. Shared understandings of fairness are different across cultures. But the most critical thing to understand is their relationship. The gut feeling may be that fairness requires a lack of bias, but in fact, data scientists must often introduce bias in order to achieve fairness.

Consider a model built to streamline hiring or promotions. If the algorithm learns from historic data, where women have been under-represented in the workforce, myriad biases against women will emerge in the model. To correct for this, data scientists might choose to introduce bias — balancing gender representation in historic data, creating synthetic data to fill in gaps, or correcting for balanced treatment (fairness) in the application of data-informed decisions. In many cases, there’s no possible way to be both unbiased and fair.

An Ethics Committee can help to not only maintain an organization’s values-based intentions, but can increase transparency into how they use AI. Even when it’s addressed, AI bias can still be maddening and frustrating for end users, and most companies deploying AIs today are subjecting people to it without giving them much agency in the process. Consider the experience of using a mapping app. When travelers are simply told which route to take, it is an experience stripped of agency; but when users are offered a set of alternate routes, they feel more confident in the selected route because they enjoyed more agency, or self-determination, in choosing it. Maximizing agency when AI is being used is another safeguard strong governance can help to ensure.

The info is here.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

The job of ‘ethics committees’ should be ethically informed code consistency review

Søren Holm
J Med Ethics doi:10.1136/medethics-2015-103343

Moore and Donnelly argue in the paper ‘The job of “ethics committees”’ that research ethics committees should be renamed and that their job should be specified as “review of proposals for consistency with the duly established and applicable code” only.  They raise a large number of issues, but in this comment I briefly want to suggest that two of their arguments are fundamentally flawed.

The first flawed argument is the argument related to the separation of powers. Moore and Donnelly proceed from the premise that it is pro tanto better to have an institutional arrangement that separates code-making powers and decisional powers, and then proceed to argue that this separation is not feasible for what they call ‘ethics consistency review’ because “no matter who established any prespecified review standards, the review decision maker must be empowered at review to revise those standards when this would make for an ethical improvement.

The response article is here.

Saturday, May 28, 2016

The job of ‘ethics committees’

Andrew Moore and Andrew Donnelly
J Med Ethics doi:10.1136/medethics-2015-102688

Abstract

What should authorities establish as the job of ethics committees and review boards? Two answers are: (1) review of proposals for consistency with the duly established and applicable code and (2) review of proposals for ethical acceptability. The present paper argues that these two jobs come apart in principle and in practice. On grounds of practicality, publicity and separation of powers, it argues that the relevant authorities do better to establish code-consistency review and not ethics-consistency review. It also rebuts bad code and independence arguments for the opposite view. It then argues that authorities at present variously specify both code-consistency and ethics-consistency jobs, but most are also unclear on this issue. The paper then argues that they should reform the job of review boards and ethics committees, by clearly establishing code-consistency review and disestablishing ethics-consistency review, and through related reform of the basic orientation, focus, name, and expertise profile of these bodies and their actions.

The article is here.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

A Code of Ethics for Health Care Ethics Consultants

Anita J. Tarzian & Lucia D. Wocial
American Journal of Bioethics 15 (5):38-51 (2015)

Abstract

For decades a debate has played out in the literature about who bioethicists are, what they do, whether they can be considered professionals qua bioethicists, and, if so, what professional responsibilities they are called to uphold. Health care ethics consultants are bioethicists who work in health care settings. They have been seeking guidance documents that speak to their special relationships/duties toward those they serve. By approving a Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibilities for Health Care Ethics Consultants, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) has moved the professionalization debate forward in a significant way. This first code of ethics focuses on individuals who provide health care ethics consultation (HCEC) in clinical settings. The evolution of the code's development, implications for the field of HCEC and bioethics, and considerations for future directions are presented here.

The entire paper is here.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

A Texas Senate Bill Would Revise the State’s End-of-Life Procedure

By Becca Aaronson
The Texas Tribune/The New York Times
Originally published March 31, 2013

Texas lawmakers have grappled year after year over whether families or medical professionals should decide when to end a terminally ill patient’s life-sustaining care. This year, they seem closer to a compromise.

“If we were only making decisions based on medical facts, everything would be straightforward,” said Dr. Leigh Fredholm, the medical director of Seton palliative care at the University Medical Center Brackenridge in Austin. “But that’s not how we make decisions.” (Seton is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.)

State law allows physicians to discontinue treatment they deem medically futile. If a physician’s decision to end treatment contradicts the patient’s advance directive or the judgment of the patient’s surrogates, state law gives patients or their families 10 days to find another provider and appeal the doctor’s decision to a hospital ethics committee.

Advocacy groups that identify as “pro-life” say existing law does not go far enough to protect the interests of patients or their families. But they are divided on how legislators should change it. While support in the Legislature’s upper chamber seems to be coalescing around Senate Bill 303, which would tweak the process, some support bills that would bar doctors or hospital ethics committees from making the final decision to end treatment.

The entire story is here.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Ethics Opinion Tackles 'Friend' Requests



This article is about the ethics for lawyers.  Simultaneously, it is an interesting read about how professionals are trying to use social networking sites to their advantage.

          *          *          *          * 
by Cynthia Foster
The Recorder

Enterprising lawyers beware: using Facebook as an investigative tool may get you into trouble with the bar, says an ethics opinion from the San Diego County Bar Association.

The opinion concludes that sending a Facebook "friend request" to a represented party violates California Rule of Professional Conduct 2-100 and could be cause for discipline. The opinion's author, Daniel Eaton, said it's the first to confront ex parte communication through social media.

Eaton, an employment defense partner at Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek in San Diego, said the bar association's ethics committee considered whether lawyers could approach Facebook the way they approach the wider, public Internet — checking a company's website for information related to a matter, for instance.

"Lawyers are making very wide use of social media, and we wanted to test the proposition that lawyers could use social media to reach out to parties that are represented. Is that a legitimate form of the kind of broad investigation that lawyers engage in using the Internet?" Eaton said.

He didn't think so. But other members of the ethics committee, including its co-chair, San Diego County Deputy District Attorney Wendy Patrick, were dubious.
"When you just hear the proposition it kind of takes you aback, because how could a friend request concern the subject matter of representation? It doesn't appear on its face to violate the rule," she said.

Patrick, who is also vice chair of the State Bar's Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct, said she was won over to Eaton's position after reading his research. The rest of the committee was, too. The opinion, which Eaton said was the lengthiest he could remember the committee ever voting on, passed unanimously in May and was approved by the association's board last week.

The opinion is not binding in state court, but according to CRPC Rule 1-100 should be used by attorneys as a behavioral guide. Eaton said the committee was surprised to find that no other associations had directly addressed the link between social media communication and ex parte communication.

According to the opinion, lawyers who try to friend opposing parties as an investigative tool are attempting to deceive them.

"And who needs friends like that?" said Patrick.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

The Ethics Committee: Part 3



This is the third and final installment of what we do as the Ethics Committee. 


We hope that these three blog posts give PPA’s membership a better idea of what we do.  The hope is also that other state associations learn from what we are doing.  If there are Ethics Committees in other state associations that engage in some creative activities, we would certainly enjoy hearing about them.

Consultation

·    PPA staff will respond to requests from members for consultation on ethical issues and often supplement their telephone or email consultations by referencing articles on the PPA Web site.

·    Ethics Committee members often respond to ethical issues that PPA members post on the PPA listserv, which has more than 700 subscribers.

·    For a fee PPA members may receive up to 3 hours per year of legal consultation from psychologist/attorneys through a legal consultation plan.

Resources for Ethics Educators

·    The Ethics Committee hosts an annual one-day workshop for Pennsylvania psychologists who teach ethics. For purposes of this conference, an ethics educator is defined broadly to include those who teach ethics in graduate school, teach ethics continuing education programs, supervise interns, belong to the ethics committees of local psychological associations, or who otherwise express an interest in teaching ethics. Topics include in-depth presentations on ethics as well as teaching strategies.

·    The Ethics Committee gives the annual Patricia M. Bricklin Award consisting of $500 to a Pennsylvania graduate student who submits the best work product (such as a paper) on ethics.

·    The Ethics Committee gives an annual award to a Pennsylvania psychologist who has made an outstanding contribution to ethics education.

·    Ethics Educators may use vignettes created by the Ethics Committee. For several years, the Ethics Committee posted an ethical dilemma on the PPA Bulletin Board. This allowed psychologists to comment on the dilemma, read the comments of other psychologists, and comment on the comments if they so choose. Several of these vignettes have had several thousand hits. We now post ethical vignettes on our Ethics Blog.

As a final thought on this theme, I invite those who are interested to visit our wikispace.  We stay organized via our wiki.  As a non-member, you can see the wiki, but not edit it.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

The Ethics Committee: Part 1


This post is the first of several that will describe what we do as part of the Ethics Committee.  In the distant past, one role of the committee was to adjudicate ethics complaints lodged against PPA members.  We no longer conduct ethics investigations.  The Pennsylvania Psychological Association refers individuals with ethics complaints to the State Board of Psychology and/or the American Psychological Association.

As a committee, there are plenty of other goals and activities related to ethics and ethics education.  The Pennsylvania Psychological Association provides our mission via the bylaws.  Part of our mission is:
The committee shall provide information to the membership and to the public about the formal ethical principles and the evolving standards of practice of psychologists. Such information shall be distributed regularly and proactively as well as in response to inquiries.
PPA, through its Ethics and other committees, works to help members understand and fulfill their ethical mandates.

Continuing Education

  • PPA’s Continuing Education Committee sponsors workshops and home study ethics CE courses. Also, Ethics Committee members and PPA staff sometimes present ethics CE programs for agencies or local psychological associations in the state. Using mostly articles published in the Pennsylvania Psychologist, PPA offers a certificate of completion to psychologists who complete a sequence of home study ethics courses.
  • Members of PPA’s Colleague Assistance Committee often present at CE programs to promote self-care and provide referrals for psychologists in distress.
  • Members of PPA’s Child Custody Committee often present at CE programs to promote high ethical standards in psychologists who provide services to divorcing families. In addition to having its own e-group, where committee members can consult with each other on issues related to custody, its members have participated in several interdisciplinary conferences with attorneys, judges, psychiatrists, and other professionals involved in child custody determinations.

Publications

  • Members of the Ethics Committee regularly write or solicit articles for PPA’s publication, the Pennsylvania Psychologist.  Many of these are then placed in the “Members Only” section of the PPA Web site and have been combined into home studies or online CE courses. Members of other committees, such as the Colleague Assistance, Forensic and Criminal Justice, or Child Custody Committees, may also write articles on ethics related to their specific concerns.
  • PPA publishes Pennsylvania Law, Ethics, and Psychology (Knapp, VandeCreek, Tepper, & Baturin, 2010) which reviews the laws and ethics codes relevant to Pennsylvania psychologists. It is now in its fifth edition and is often used in ethics courses in psychology doctoral programs.

We also view this blog as an extension of our goal to educate the public and our members about ethics and ethical principles.

More to follow.