Does an 'A' in Ethics Have Any Value?

B-Schools Step Up Efforts to Tie Moral Principles to Their Business Programs, but Quantifying Those Virtues Is Tough

By MELISSA KORN
The Wall Street Journal
Originally published on February 6, 2013

Business-school professors are making a morality play.

Four years after the scandals of the financial crisis prompted deans and faculty to re-examine how they teach ethics, some academics say they still haven't gotten it right.

Hoping to prevent another Bernard L. Madoff-like scandal or insider-trading debacle, a group of schools, led by University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business in Boulder, is trying to generate support for more ethics teaching in business programs.

"Business schools have been giving students some education in ethics for at least the past 25 or 30 years, and we still have these problems," such as irresponsibly risky bets or manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, says John Delaney, dean of University of Pittsburgh's College of Business Administration and Katz Graduate School of Business.

He joined faculty and administrators from Massachusetts' Babson College, Michigan State University and other schools in Colorado last summer in what he says is an effort to move schools from talk to action. The Colorado consortium is holding conference calls and is exploring another meeting later this year as it exchanges ideas on program design, course content and how to build support among other faculty members.

But some efforts are at risk of stalling at the discussion stage, since teaching business ethics faces roadblocks from faculty and recruiters alike. Some professors see ethics as separate from their own subjects, such as accounting or marketing, and companies have their own training programs for new hires.

The entire story is here.

iDoctor: Could a Smartphone be the future of Medicine?

The story is here.

Ethical Framework for the Use of Technology in Supervision

By LoriAnn S. Stretch, DeeAnna Nagel and Kate Anthony

Ethical and Statutory Considerations

Supervisors must demonstrate and promote good practice by the supervisee to ensure supervisees acquire the attitudes, skills, and knowledge necessary to protect clients. Supervisors and supervisees must research and abide by all applicable legal, ethical, and customary requirements of the jurisdiction in which the supervisor and supervisee practice.   The supervisor and supervisee must document relevant requirements in the respective record(s).  Supervisors and supervisees need to review and abide by requirements and restrictions of liability insurance and accrediting bodies as well.

Informed Consent

Supervisors will review the purposes, goals, procedures, limitations, potential risks, and benefits of distance services and techniques. All policies and procedures will be provided in writing and reviewed verbally before or during the initial session. Documentation of understanding by all parties will be maintained in the respective record(s).

Supervisor Qualifications

Supervisors will only provide services for which the supervisor is qualified.  The supervisor will provide copies of licensure, credentialing, and training upon request.  The supervisor will have a minimum of 15 hours of training in distance clinical supervision as well as an active license and authorization to provide supervision within the jurisdiction for which supervision will be provided. Supervisors providing distance supervision should participate in professional organizations related to distance services and develop a network of professional colleagues for peer and supervisory support.

Supervisee and Client Considerations

Supervisors will screen supervisees for appropriateness to receive services via distance methods. The supervisor will document objective reasons for the supervisee’s appropriateness in the respective record(s).  Supervisors will ensure that supervisees screen clients seeking distance services for appropriateness to receive services via distance methods. Supervisors will ensure that the supervisee utilizes objective methods for screening clients and maintains appropriate documentation in the respective record(s).

Supervisors will ensure that supervisees inform clients of the supervisory relationship and that all clients have written information on how to contact the supervisor.  Written documentation of the client acknowledging the supervisory relationship and receipt of the supervisor’s contact information should be maintained in the respective record(s). Supervisors will only advise the supervisee to provide services for which the supervisee is qualified to provide.
Clients and supervisees must be informed of potential hazards of distance communications, including warnings about sharing private information when using a public access or computer that is on a shared network.  Clients and supervisees should be discouraged, in writing, from saving passwords and user names when prompted by the computer.  Clients and supervisees should be encouraged to review employer’s policies regarding using work computers for distance services.

The entire story is here.

Successful and Schizophrenic

By ELYN R. SAKS
The New York Times - Opinion
Published: January 25, 2013

THIRTY years ago, I was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. My prognosis was “grave”: I would never live independently, hold a job, find a loving partner, get married. My home would be a board-and-care facility, my days spent watching TV in a day room with other people debilitated by mental illness. I would work at menial jobs when my symptoms were quiet. Following my last psychiatric hospitalization at the age of 28, I was encouraged by a doctor to work as a cashier making change. If I could handle that, I was told, we would reassess my ability to hold a more demanding position, perhaps even something full-time.

Then I made a decision. I would write the narrative of my life. Today I am a chaired professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. I have an adjunct appointment in the department of psychiatry at the medical school of the University of California, San Diego, and am on the faculty of the New Center for Psychoanalysis. The MacArthur Foundation gave me a genius grant.

Although I fought my diagnosis for many years, I came to accept that I have schizophrenia and will be in treatment the rest of my life. Indeed, excellent psychoanalytic treatment and medication have been critical to my success. What I refused to accept was my prognosis.

The entire article is here.

Budding designer from Paramus left "suicide diary," according to newspaper report.

Englewood-Englewood Cliffs Patch
Originally posted February 7, 2013

A 22-year-old aspiring fashion designer originally from Paramus jumped off the George Washington Bridge Wednesday and left behind a list of five girls she did not want at her funeral, the New York Post reported.

Riders on a jitney bus saw Ashley A. Riggitano plunge from the New Jersey-bound lanes at around 4:40 p.m., the report said. She reportedly left a Louis Vuitton bag containing pages of notes in a "suicide diary" on the bridge walkway.

Riggitano was apparently bullied by friends in the fashion industry, according to the Post report. The girls banned from her funeral were reportedly from work and college.

“All my other ‘friends’ are in it for gossip,” she wrote in the letter, the Post reported. “Never there.”

Riggitano had attempted to commit suicide before, the newspaper reported.

The entire story is here.

Physicians and Malpractice Data

On Average, Physicians Spend Nearly 11 Percent Of Their 40-Year Careers With An Open, Unresolved Malpractice Claim

By Seth A. Seabury, Amitabh Chandra, Darius N. Lakdawalla, and Anupam B. Jena

Abstract

The US malpractice system is widely regarded as inefficient, in part because of the time required to resolve malpractice cases. Analyzing data from 40,916 physicians covered by a nationwide insurer, we found that the average physician spends 50.7 months—or almost 11 percent—of an assumed forty-year career with an unresolved, open malpractice claim. Although damages are a factor in how doctors perceive medical malpractice, even more distressing for the doctor and the patient may be the amount of time these claims take to be adjudicated. We conclude that this fact makes it important to assess malpractice reforms by how well they are able to reduce the time of malpractice litigation without undermining the needs of the affected patient.

The research can be found here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this information.

Medical malpractice: Why is it so hard for doctors to apologize?

Fixing a system built on blame and revenge will require bold ways of analyzing mistakes and a radical embrace of openness.

By Dr. Darshak Sanghavi
The Boston Globe
Originally posted on January 27, 2013


DANIELLE BELLEROSE WENT THROUGH HELL for two years trying to conceive, undergoing nine rounds of fertility treatments before she finally got pregnant with twins in late 2003. Shortly thereafter, the then 28-year-old nurse and Massachusetts native developed a complication that required months of bed rest at home. Suddenly, on a June night nearly three months before her due date, Danielle’s uterus began bleeding profusely. At 4:56 a.m. she had an emergency caesarean section at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Her daughters, Katherine and Alexis, entered the world weighing only about 3 pounds each.

Everything seemed to go well until the end of the first week. When Danielle and her husband, John, visited the unit, Alexis looked fine, but Katherine appeared mottled and pale. Panicked, Danielle found a nurse, and testing confirmed that Katherine was in profound shock due to necrotizing enterocolitis, a devastating intestinal complication that affects premature babies. The infant’s blood had turned acidic. An X-ray indicated a tear in her bowel. Just after midnight, Katherine was taken by ambulance to Children’s Hospital Boston.

Extremely premature infants such as Katherine and Alexis are entirely unprepared to live outside their mother’s womb. After only 30 weeks of gestation, the newborn heart isn’t fully developed, and the intestines can’t easily digest breast milk or formula. At that age, a baby’s brain often doesn’t remember to breathe. In 1963, when President John F. Kennedy’s son, Patrick, was born prematurely, the only thing to do was “monitor the infant’s blood chemistry,” as a newspaper of the day put it. Patrick Kennedy died after two days. By the time Katherine Bellerose was being cared for in the same hospital, however, new treatments had increased survival rates in very low birth weight infants to 96 percent.

Still, at Children’s Hospital, Katherine struggled to survive. Surgeons made a last-ditch effort to save her life by removing her colon, in the hope that this would halt further damage. She failed to improve. Multiple rounds of CPR were performed.

The rest of the story is here.

Grief Over New Depression Diagnosis

By Paula Span
The New York Time Blog - The New Old Age
Originally published January 24, 2013

When the American Psychiatric Association unveils a proposed new version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, it expects controversy. Illnesses get added or deleted, acquire new definitions or lists of symptoms. Everyone from advocacy groups to insurance companies to litigators — all have an interest in what’s defined as mental illness — pays close attention. Invariably, complaints ensue.

“We asked for commentary,” said David Kupfer, the University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who has spent six years as chairman of the task force that is updating the handbook. He sounded unruffled. “We asked for it and we got it. This was not going to be done in a dark room somewhere.”

But the D.S.M. 5, to be published in May, has generated an unusual amount of heat. Two changes, in particular, could have considerable impact on older people and their families.

First, the new volume revises some of the criteria for major depressive disorder. The D.S.M. IV (among other changes, the new manual swaps Roman numerals for Arabic ones) set out a list of symptoms that over a two-week period would trigger a diagnosis of major depression: either feelings of sadness or emptiness, or a loss of interest or pleasure in most daily activities, plus sleep disturbances, weight loss, fatigue, distraction or other problems, to the extent that they impair someone’s functioning.

The entire blog post is here.

Proposed DSM-5 Changes To Assessment Of Alcohol Problems

Medical News Today
Originally posted January 24, 2013

Proposed changes to the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) will affect the criteria used to assess alcohol problems. One change would collapse the two diagnoses of alcohol abuse (AA) and alcohol dependence (AD) into a single diagnosis called alcohol use disorder (AUD). A second change would remove "legal problems," and a third would add a criterion of "craving." A study of the potential consequences of these changes has found they are unlikely to significantly change the prevalence of diagnoses.

Results will be published in the March 2013 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"Updating the DSM could be advantageous if changes are made based on improvements in our understanding of a disorder's etiology, and/or if changes improve the accuracy of the diagnosis," said Alexis C. Edwards, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine as well as corresponding author for the study. "It would probably be a little disappointing if no changes were ever made, because that might suggest that we haven't made much headway in understanding and accurately diagnosing psychiatric disorders, despite all our efforts."

The entire story is here.