What Healthcare Ethics Consultants Should Know About Inequity
Saturday, October 14, 2023
7:30 AM – 8:45 AM ET
Location: Laurel AB (Fourth Floor)
While the Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibilities for Healthcare Ethics Consultants calls for HCE consultants to ensure that "recommendations do not reinforce injustice," little work has been done to provide consultants specific guidance on how fulfill this obligation.
To bridge this gap, this presentation will outline six concepts from the social sciences that provide a basis for HCE consultants to interpret and respond to inequity at the bedside. These core concepts include that (1) inequity emerges from social systems, (2) health, illness, and medicine are also co-constructed within social systems, (3) bioethics was born out of concerns of social injustices in medicine, and that (4) individuals are situated within these intersecting systems. In addition to explaining each concept, this presentation will demonstrate the relevancy of these to the role of the HCE consultant with historic data and thought experiments.
In addition, the presenter will then argue that additionally, HCE consultants should (5) be able to reflect on how one's power, privilege and positionality shapes their process and recommendations and (6) be able to identify how inequity emerges in social discourse and rhetoric in the treatment decision-making. The presenter will pull from research from adjacent helping disciplines, such as social work and counseling psychology, on how this is accomplished in day-to-day tasks with patients and multidisciplinary treatment teams.