Health Care Ethics Seminars

The Poynter Center invites six to eight speakers during the academic year to address ethical concerns of community health care providers. Discussion participants include faculty members, students, local physicians and nurses, and center staff.
Each program is from 4-5:15 p.m. at the Poynter Center, 618 East Third Street. The Henderson/Atwater parking garage, which is located at the back of the Poynter Center, is open and provides pay public parking.

The 2010 Spring Health Care Ethics Seminars

Thursday, February 18
Dr. Rob Stone
"Healthcare Reform: Where Do We Go From Here?"
Dr. Rob Stone has been an emergency room physician at Bloomington Hospital since 1983. He is an assistant clinical professor of emergency medicine in the IU School of Medicine and director of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan.

Thursday, March 25
John Baumann
John Baumann is the director of the office for Research Ethics Education Program.

Thursday, April 22
Lucia D. Wocial
Lucia Wocial is a Program Leader for the Fairbanks Program in Nursing Ethics in Indianapolis.

Completed 2009 Fall Health Care Ethics Seminars

Thursday, September 17 Joshua E. Perry, "The Case of Mrs. K: A Saturday Morning Clinical Ethics Consultation" Joshua Perry is Assistant Professor of Business Law & Ethics at the IU Kelley School of Business. "Consideration of ethical issues in the care of patients" has been required by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospital Organizations (JCAHO) since the early 1990s. Nearly 20 years later debate continues about whether the messy business of clinical ethics consultation should or can be standardized and how one might measure the value added when an ethicist intervenes at the bedside. What exactly does a clinical ethicist do and what does a "successful" consult look like? Using Mrs. K’s case as a frame, Professor Perry and participants explored these themes.	Provost Karen Hanson, Speaker Josh Perry, Poynter Center Director Richard Miller, and Kelley School of Business Professor Jane Mallor after Perry's presentation.

Thursday, October 22
Robert Crouch, "Medical Interventions on Children for Nonmedical Reasons: How Far May Parents Go?"
Robert Crouch is a Research Assistant at the Poynter Center.

Having a parent make therapeutic decisions on behalf of a child is a complicated matter. It is even more complicated when the medical intervention in question is contemplated for nonmedical (or nontherapeutic) reasons. The so-called best interest standard is typically invoked to guide parental decision making in the therapeutic context; parents are thus to consider the well-being of the child in deciding which therapeutic option, if any, to choose. But when the medical intervention is responsive to something other than the child's medical needs, the best interest standard is of questionable use. Some examples include: removal of bone marrow (or a kidney) from a child to donate to a sibling; surgery to "Westernize" the eyes of an Asian child; surgery to "correct" the "ambiguous" genitalia of an infant; synthetic growth hormone to increase the adult height of children who are not growth hormone deficient; high-dose estrogen to attenuate the growth of a severely developmentally delayed child. Crouch will examine cases like these in order to articulate the moral contours of parental authority in making such decisions on behalf of a child.

Thursday, November 19
Eleanor Kinney, "Professional Profiteering in Failed Health Care Services Markets"

The amount of money devoted to health care in the United States is staggering. The US spends way more per capita than any other nation and yet does not have better health outcomes. Why do other countries achieve more with less? Where does the money go in our health care sector? What are ethical levels of compensation for health care providers in a highly subsidized and failed market for health care services? Eleanor Kinney is the Hall Render Professor of Law and co-director of the William S. and Christine S. Hall Center for Law and Health at the IU School of Law-Indianapolis.	Eleanor Kinney makes a point during her presentation about the costs of healthcare in the US.

Thursday, December 10
Katherine Drabiak-Syed, "Baby Gender Mentor: Class Action Litigation Calls Attention to a Deficient Federal Regulatory Framework for Direct to Consumer Genetic Tests, Politicized Statutory Construction, and a Lack of Informed Consent"

Katherine Drabiak-Syed, JD, is Faculty Investigator at the IU Center for Bioethics. She spoke about the problems with direct-to-consumer genetic tests and the failure of regulatory agencies to regulate and monitor effectively the claims manufacturers make about the tests that are marketed to the public. She used the Baby Gender Mentor as an exmaple.	Katherine Drabiak-Syed

Completed 2010 Spring Health Care Ethics Seminars

Thursday, January 21
Jason Eberl
"Foundation for a Natural Right to Health Care"
A perennial philosophical and legal question underlying the health care reform debate in the U.S. and elsewhere is whether there is a "natural right" to at least a "minimally decent" level of health care which ought to be guaranteed by the state in the event private industry does not provide adequate access to basic health services. Several theories converge upon a positive answer to this question, including Thomsitic natural law theory, Martha Nussbaum's "capabilities" approach to moral rights and obligations, and even John Locke's concept of "natural rights," which is typically appealed to in order to justify the sanctity of property rights in a free market system. Professor Jason T. Eberl, who is in the Department of Philosophy at IUPUI, will address these issues.

See also the Matthew Vandivier Sims Memorial Lecture.