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  • Joint Centre for Bioethics: The Scope of Clinical Ethics - Letting Go of Moral Distress

Joint Centre for Bioethics: The Scope of Clinical Ethics - Letting Go of Moral Distress

  • 29 Sep 2021
  • 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Webinar

About this event

Speakers:

Dave Langlois, PhD, 
Centre for Clinical Ethics, Unity Health Toronto, University of Toronto

 Jeremy Butler, PhD, Queen's University

About this Seminar:

It is widely agreed that clinical ethicists have an important role to play in responding to and managing the moral distress of clinicians. An ethicist's responsibilities with respect to moral distress are understood not only to include organization-level interventions (e.g., building policies and practices that address structural sources of moral distress) but clinician-level and case-specific interventions as well (e.g., meeting with individual clinicians to discuss their moral distress, offering reflective moral distress debriefs to teams). The assumption that the ethicist role appropriately carries these responsibilities concerning the management of moral distress is reflected in job ads and ethics services' self-descriptions, as well as the academic literature.

In this presentation, we argue that although clinical ethicists may have some role to play in policy-level interventions concerning moral distress, and although clinical ethicists can serve a crucial function in the management of clinical cases, the profession ought not to claim any special role in the direct, clinical-/case-level management of moral distress. We propose that claims of expertise in the case-level management of moral distress are likely the result of either a misunderstanding of what moral distress is or a misunderstanding of what should be involved in responding to an individual's or team's moral distress. We contend that if our inchoate profession has any hope of making legitimate claims about its scope and expertise in the clinical domain, we will need to exercise greater caution in how we do and describe our clinical work.

Additional Details:

This event is free and is open to the general public.

The direct link to the seminar will be sent out to registered participants 2 hours before the event. All of the JCB Bioethics Seminars are now being live streamed to our YouTube channel. If you don't receive the link 2 hours before the event, please head over there and click on the live stream. Subscribe to our channel to receive notices of live events.

Questions?

Please email Laurie Bulchak, laurie.bulchak@utoronto.ca.



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