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 public education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public education. Show all posts

Monday, July 26, 2021

Do doctors engaging in advocacy speak for themselves or their profession?

Elizabeth Lanphier
Journal of Medical Ethics Blog
Originally posted 17 June 21

Here is an excerpt:

My concern is not the claim that expertise should be shared. (It should!) Nor do I think there is any neat distinction between physician responsibilities for individual health and public health. But I worry that when Strous and Karni alternately frame physician duties to “speak out” as individual duties and collective ones, they collapse necessary distinctions between the risks, benefits, and demands of these two types of obligations.

Many of us have various role-based individual responsibilities. We can have obligations as a parent, as a citizen, or as a professional. Having an individual responsibility as a physician involves duties to your patients, but also general duties to care in the event you are in a situation in which your expertise is needed (the “is there a doctor on this flight?” scenario).

Collective responsibility, on the other hand, is when a group has a responsibility as a group. The philosophical literature debates hard to resolve questions about what it means to be a “group,” and how groups come to have or discharge responsibilities. Collective responsibility raises complicated questions like: If physicians have a collective responsibility to speak out during the COVID-19 pandemic, does every physician has such an obligation? Does any individual physician?

Because individual obligations attribute duties to specific persons responsible for carrying them out in ways collective duties tend not to, I why individual physician obligations are attractive. But this comes with risks. One risk is that a physician speaks out as an individual, appealing to the authority of their medical credentials, but not in alignment with their profession.

In my essay I describe a family physician inviting his extended family for a holiday meal during a peak period of SARS-CoV-2 transmission because he didn’t think COVID-19 was a “big deal.”

More infamously, Dr. Scott Atlas served as Donald J. Trump’s coronavirus advisor, and although he is a physician, he did not have experience in public health, infectious disease, or critical care medicine applicable to COVID-19. Atlas was a physician speaking as a physician, but he routinely promoted views starkly different than those of physicians with expertise relevant to the pandemic, and the guidance coming from scientific and medical communities.

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Current practices in reporting on behavioural genetics can mislead the public

Science Daily
Originally published December 2, 2014

Summary:

“Media reports about behavioural genetics unintentionally induce unfounded beliefs, therefore going against the educational purpose of scientific reporting,” writes a researcher following his study of 1,500 Americans. Public misunderstanding is not the only thing to blame for this misinterpretation. “Generally, science reporters’ first goal is to inform the public about scientific developments. However, this practice is not disinterested; some news is purposely written in a manner intended to catch the public’s attention with startling results in order to increase or to maintain market shares," the researcher explained.

The entire article is here.

Monday, July 14, 2014

Episode 11: Why Marketing is our Ethical Duty (and why Public Education is an ideal way to do it)

In this episode, John talks with Pauline Wallin, PhD, expert in marketing, public education, and media as well as a cofounder of The Practice Institute, where she helps clinicians build their practices.  It is important for psychologists to understand why marketing a psychological practice helps protect the public and raise awareness of how psychotherapy can improve people's lives.  Pauline makes the distinction between marketing and selling.  We also discuss four ethical ways to market psychological services via public education.

The end of this podcast, the listener will be able to:

1. Describe two ways that marketing your practice benefits the public.
2. List four ways to use public education to market your practice.
3. Describe two potential ethical pitfalls in marketing via public education, and how to avoid them.

Find this podcast on iTunes

For 1 APA-approved credit, click here.

Listen directly on this site here.



Resources

Dr. Pauline Wallin's website  @DoctorWallin

The Practice Institute  @PracticeHelp

APA Code of Conduct: Standard 5 - Advertising and Other Public Statements

National Institute of Health Information on Mental Health

American Psychological Association Media Referral Service

"Psychology Works" Facts Sheets - Canadian Psychological Association

Help a Reporter Out

Friday, March 22, 2013

At Penn State, Academics Drive Effort to Hire Child-Abuse Experts

By Robin Wilson
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published March 11, 2013

When the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal broke, in 2011, professors at Pennsylvania State University were as shocked as anyone else. Then they did what faculty members often do: They set about formulating an academic response to the horrifying incidents, some of which had occurred on their own University Park campus.

The result is a campaign to hire over the next three years a dozen faculty members whose work focuses on child abuse and entails cutting-edge research, clinical treatment, and public education about the problem. The hiring is on a fast track: The university just opened six searches and hopes to have a half-dozen new tenured and tenure-track hires on campus by next fall.

The entire story is here.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Getting Fat and Fatter

By Kim McPherson
The Lancet
doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60966-0

Book Review
Fat Fate and Disease: Why Exercise and Diet Are Not Enough
By Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson
Oxford University Press

"We need a public debate about what it means to keep markets in their place. And to have this debate, we have to think through the moral limits of markets. We need to recognise that there are some things that money can't buy and other things that money can buy but shouldn't."

Michael Sandel, “Market and Morals”

We live in a world where it is increasingly apparent that markets have all sorts of unwanted consequences, but they remain the bedrock of our civilisation. That we should relentlessly pursue economic growth is unquestioned, while the planet is drying up and we are becoming increasingly obese. And by a dominant political account the way to grow is to liberate the markets wherever we can. Thus the planet nears extinction more quickly and the prevalence of type 2 diabetes increases alarmingly across the globe. So is some kind of consensual good will required, as Michael Sandel suggested in his 2009 Reith Lecture?

(cut)

We have yet to discover an acceptable way to make markets properly balance all the pay-offs caused by unhealthy production, one of which is to suffer loss at the point of production commensurate with the harm of causing bad health in the longer term. We are not even close. Good will and responsible citizenship are not, I suspect, going to solve this problem simply because profit and growth trump everything.

The entire review and commentary are here.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Nurse's suicide highlights twin tragedies of medical errors















by JoNel Aleccia
Health writer - msnbc.com

For registered nurse Kimberly Hiatt, the horror began last Sept. 14, the moment she realized she’d overdosed a fragile baby with 10 times too much medication.

Stunned, she told nearby staff at the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Seattle Children’s Hospital what had happened. “It was in the line of, ‘Oh my God, I have given too much calcium,’” recalled a fellow nurse, Michelle Asplin, in a statement to state investigators.

In Hiatt’s 24-year career, all of it at Seattle Children’s, dispensing 1.4 grams of calcium chloride — instead of the correct dose of 140 milligrams — was the only serious medical mistake she’d ever made, public investigation records show.

“She was devastated, just devastated,” said Lyn Hiatt, 49, of Seattle, Kim’s partner and co-parent of their two children, Eli, 18, and Sydney, 16.

That mistake turned out to be the beginning of an unraveled life, contributing not only to the death of the child, 8-month-old Kaia Zautner, but also to Hiatt’s firing, a state nursing commission investigation — and Hiatt's suicide on April 3 at age 50.

Hiatt’s dismissal — and her death — raise larger questions about the impact of errors on providers, the so-called “second victims” of medical mistakes. That’s a phrase coined a decade ago by Dr. Albert Wu, a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

It’s meant to describe the twin casualties caused by a serious medical mistake: The first victim is the patient, the person hurt or killed by a preventable error — but the second victim is the person who has to live with the aftermath of making it.

No question, the patients are the top concern in a nation where 1 in 7 Medicare patients experience serious harm because of medical errors and hospital infections each year, and 180,000 patients die, according to a November 2010 study by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General.

That’s nearly double the 98,000 deaths attributed to preventable errors in the pivotal 2000 report “To Err is Human,” by the Institute of Medicine, which galvanized the nation's patient safety movement.

In reality, though, the doctors, nurses and other medical workers who commit errors are often traumatized as well, with reactions that range from anxiety and sleeping problems to doubt about their professional abilities — and thoughts of suicide, according to two recent studies.

Surgeons who believed they made medical errors were more than three times as likely to have considered suicide as those who didn’t, according to a January survey of more nearly 8,000 participants published in the Archives of Surgery.

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 The entire story can be found here.