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96‘I just love these sessions’. Should physician satisfaction matter in clinical ethics consultations?Clinical Ethics 7 (3): 116-121. 2012.Clinical ethics committees aim to resolve conflict, facilitate communication and ease moral distress in health care. Dialogue in committee discussions is complex and involves a balance between implicitly and explicitly expressed values of patients, families and professionals. Evaluating effectiveness and concrete outcomes is challenging and most studies focus on broad benefits such as quality of care and reduction of unnecessary or unwanted treatments. In this paper we propose ‘physician satisfa…Read more
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68The Unique Nature of Clinical Ethics in Allied Health Pediatrics: Implications for Ethics EducationCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 19 (4): 471-480. 2010.Ethics education is recognized as an integral component of health professionals’ education and has been occurring in various guises in the curricula of health professional training in many countries since at least the 1970s. However, there are a number of different aims and approaches adopted by individual educators, programs, and, importantly, different health professions that may be characterized according to strands or trends in ethics education
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47The role of emotions in health professional ethics teachingJournal of Medical Ethics 40 (5): 331-335. 2014.In this paper, we put forward the view that emotions have a legitimate and important role in health professional ethics education. This paper draws upon our experience of running a narrative ethics education programme for ethics educators from a range of healthcare disciplines. It describes the way in which emotions may be elicited in narrative ethics teaching and considers the appropriate role of emotions in ethics education for health professionals. We argue there is a need for a pedagogical f…Read more
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38Making a difference: incorporating theories of autonomy into models of informed consentJournal of Medical Ethics 34 (9). 2008.Background: Obtaining patients’ informed consent is an ethical and legal obligation in healthcare practice. Whilst the law provides prescriptive rules and guidelines, ethical theories of autonomy provide moral foundations. Models of practice of consent, have been developed in the bioethical literature to assist in understanding and integrating the ethical theory of autonomy and legal obligations into the clinical process of obtaining a patient’s informed consent to treatment.Aims: To review four…Read more
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32The zone of parental discretion and the complexity of paediatrics: A response to AldersonClinical Ethics 13 (4): 172-174. 2018.Alderson critiques our recent book on the basis that it overlooks children’s own views about their medical treatment. In this response, we discuss the complexity of the paediatric clinical context and the value of diverse approaches to investigating paediatric ethics. Our book focuses on a specific problem: entrenched disagreements between doctors and parents about a child’s medical treatment in the context of a paediatric hospital. As clinical ethicists, our research question arose from clinici…Read more
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31Balancing health worker well-being and duty to care: an ethical approach to staff safety in COVID-19 and beyondJournal of Medical Ethics 47 (5): 318-323. 2021.The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the risks that can be involved in healthcare work. In this paper, we explore the issue of staff safety in clinical work using the example of personal protective equipment in the COVID-19 crisis. We articulate some of the specific ethical challenges around PPE currently being faced by front-line clinicians, and develop an approach to staff safety that involves balancing duty to care and personal well-being. We describe each of these values, and present a deci…Read more
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28Should clinicians make chest surgery available to transgender male adolescents?Bioethics 35 (7): 696-703. 2021.Bioethics, Volume 35, Issue 7, Page 696-703, September 2021.
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23Collaboration in Clinical Ethics Consultation: A Method for Achieving “Balanced Accountability”American Journal of Bioethics 14 (6): 47-48. 2014.No abstract
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23Ethics of fertility preservation for prepubertal children: should clinicians offer procedures where efficacy is largely unproven?Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (1): 27-31. 2018.Young children with cancer are treated with interventions that can have a high risk of compromising their reproductive potential. ‘Fertility preservation’ for children who have not yet reached puberty involves surgically removing and cryopreserving reproductive tissue prior to treatment in the expectation that strategies for the use of this tissue will be developed in the future. Fertility preservation for prepubertal children is ethically complex because the techniques largely lack proven effic…Read more
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23Making Meaning From Experience: A Working Typology for Pediatrics Ethics ConsultationsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 15 (5): 24-26. 2015.
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22Reflecting Before, During, and After the Heat of the Moment: A Review of Four Approaches for Supporting Health Staff to Manage Stressful Events (review)Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 18 (4): 573-587. 2021.Being a healthcare professional in both paediatric and adult hospitals will mean being exposed to human tragedies and stressful events involving conflict, misunderstanding, and moral distress. There are a number of different structured approaches to reflection and discussion designed to support healthcare professionals process and make sense of their feelings and experiences and to mitigate against direct and vicarious trauma. In this paper, we draw from our experience in a large children’s hosp…Read more
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19Ethics of fertility preservation for prepubertal children: should clinicians offer procedures where efficacy is largely unproven?Journal of Medical Ethics Recent Issues 44 (1): 27-31. 2017.Young children with cancer are treated with interventions that can have a high risk of compromising their reproductive potential. ‘Fertility preservation’ for children who have not yet reached puberty involves surgically removing and cryopreserving reproductive tissue prior to treatment in the expectation that strategies for the use of this tissue will be developed in the future. Fertility preservation for prepubertal children is ethically complex because the techniques largely lack proven effic…Read more
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18In this paper, we explore the ethics of restricting visitation to hospitals during an infectious disease outbreak. We aim to answer three questions: What are the features of an ethically justified hospital visitor restriction policy? Should policies include scope for case‐by‐case exemptions? How should decisions about exemptions be made? Based on a critical interpretive review of the existing ethical literature on visitor restrictions, we argue that an ethically justified hospital visitor restri…Read more
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18Telling the truth to seriously ill children: Considering children's interests when parents veto telling the truthBioethics 36 (7): 765-773. 2022.Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 7, Page 765-773, September 2022.
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16The Value of Open Deliberation in Clinical Ethics, and the Role of Parents’ Reasons in the Zone of Parental DiscretionAmerican Journal of Bioethics 18 (8): 47-49. 2018.
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15Managing aggression in hospitals: A role for clinical ethicistsClinical Ethics 16 (3): 252-258. 2021.Hospitals are places where patients are unwell, where patients and their families may be upset, confused, frustrated, in pain, and vulnerable. The likelihood of these experiences and emotions manifesting in anger and aggressive behaviour is high. In this paper, we describe the involvement of a clinical ethics service responding to a request to discuss family aggression within a rehabilitation department in a large paediatric hospital in Australia. We suggest two key advantages of involving a cli…Read more
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14“I Left the Museum Somewhat Changed”: Visual Arts and Health Ethics EducationCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 27 (3): 511-524. 2018.:A common goal of ethics education is to equip students who later become health practitioners to not only know about the ethical principles guiding their practice, but to also autonomously recognize when and how these principles might apply and assist these future practitioners in providing care for patients and families. This article aims to contribute to discussions about ethics education pedagogy and teaching, by presenting and evaluating the use of the visual arts as an educational approach …Read more
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11Pediatric Ethics Consultation: Practical Considerations for the Clinical Ethics ConsultantJournal of Clinical Ethics 30 (3): 270-283. 2019.Clinical ethics consultants face a wide range of ethical dilemmas that require broad knowledge and skills. Although there is considerable overlap with the approach to adult consultation, ethics consultants must be aware of differences when they work with infant, pediatric, and adolescent cases. This article addresses unique considerations in the pediatric setting, reviews foundational theories on parental authority, suggests practical approaches to pediatric consultation, and outlines current av…Read more
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9Telling the Truth to Child Cancer Patients in COVID-19 TimesJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 17 (4): 797-801. 2020.A notable feature of the COVID-19 pandemic is that children are less at risk of becoming infected or, if infected, less likely to become seriously unwell, so ethical discussions have consequently focused on the adult healthcare setting. However, despite a lower risk of children becoming acutely ill with COVID-19, there nevertheless may be significant and potentially sustained effects of COVID-19 on the physical, psychological, and emotional health and well-being of children. Focusing on the cont…Read more
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7Expertise and Knowledge Required to Support Health Staff to Manage Stressful EventsJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 19 (4): 535-536. 2022.
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Asian Philosophy |