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 public parking.

The 2008 Spring Health Care Ethics Seminars

Thursday, April 17
Paul Helft, Director of the Charles Warren Fairbanks Center for Medical Ethics at Clarian Health Partners, will speak. His topic is “How can a clinical ethics center engage practical problems for healthcare professionals and patients?”

In this talk, Dr. Helft will review the history, development, programs, and work of the Charles Warren Fairbanks Center for Medical Ethics at Clarian Health in Indianapolis. Issues for discussion include:

• how ethics service, education, and research can affect the working lives of healthcare professionals and the patients they care for
• models for teaching ethics to interdisciplinary professionals
• how modern healthcare and its complexity might benefit from ethical voices.

Dr. Helft is Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the Indiana University School of Medicine in addition to being director of the Center. See Charles Warren Fairbanks Center for Medical Ethics for further information about the Center.

Completed seminars for spring 2008

Thursday, January 17
Ginny Gremillion, retired ethicist from Memorial Hermann Hospital, Houston, spoke on the topic, "If Only the Doctor Had Said. . . ."

Building on her years of experience dealing with difficult family and medical situations, Ginny poke about communication among physicians, family, and patient, and discussed the Texas law on medical futility.

Thursday, February 28
Professor Helen Gremillion, Department of Gender Studies, will speak on "Talk Therapy as Cultural Practice: A 'Narrative' Approach to Culture, Power, and Change."

"Narrative therapy," developed in the 1980s by Australian Michael White in collaboration with New Zealander David Epston, is an approach to talk therapy that explores the sociopolitical contexts of all clients' lives and relationships. Narrative work grew out of a critique of supposed cultural and interpersonal "neutrality" or "objectivity" within mainstream therapeutic practice. This talk presented narrative work as an alternative to standard therapies for anorexia nervosa in particular (the latter is the subject of Gremillion's book, Feeding Anorexia: Gender and Power at a Treatment Center).

Thursday, March 20
Dr. Larry Cripe, M.D., Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology, Indiana University School of Medicine, will speak on "In the Shadow of Hope: Truth-telling in Oncology."

Truth telling in oncology is essential if the person with cancer is to have the opportunity to receive care consistent with his or her values. However, the tragic dimensions of cancer, especially when life is likely to end, challenge our ability to communicate with compassion and honesty. The conflict between compassion and truth telling becomes most apparent in the frequently expressed desire to maintain hope or to avoid destroying hope. This talk will explore through narratives the evolution of the concept of hope and the understanding of the ethics of disclosure of information, and will suggest a model of conversations that may foster hopefulness in the setting of a terminal illness.

See also the Matthew Vandivier Sims Memorial Lecture.