June 01, 2001
Healthcare providers connect at HCECG annual conference
The Health Care Ethics Consortium of Georgia hosted its annual statewide conference, "Ethics in a House Divided: Connecting Decision Makers in Healthcare Organizations," on May 22 and 23, 2001. The goal of the conference was to bring together the many different professionals who are called to address complex problems within healthcare organizations. In attendance were physicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, administrators, health lawyers, risk managers, case managers, and others from around the state.
On Tuesday, May 22 over 75 participants listened to keynote speaker Carol Taylor, Director of the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University. She was able to clearly articulate for the group the competencies needed for one to behave with moral agency and the importance of moral integrity both within the individual and within the healthcare organization. In the afternoon she offered the group tools they could take back to their organizations to help them assess their institutional moral leadership.
The conference featured several case presentations and discussions. The morning case involved a situation that occurred in Tennessee where a surgeon asked an African-American provider to replace himself with a white provider at the request of the patient's husband. The panel provided an array of perspectives from different professionals on how this case might have been handled. In the afternoon small groups of participants in facilitated discussions discussed an array of cases from one involving medication errors to another involving uninsured immigrant and migrant workers.
The day concluded with a closing presentation by Larry Minnix, CEO and President of the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging. Using a number of stories, he discussed how healthcare could be healthy, affordable and ethical. He concluded his talk with the challenge to the group to "make ethics more than a whisper."
The second day of the conference was "An Interactive Workshop with Ethics Committee Leaders in Georgia." As part of this discussion two unique programs were presented. As an outgrowth of a project addressing end-of-life advance care planning the Southwest Georgia Regional Ethics Council was developed to address issues that impact a population larger than just that of one hospital. The WELLSTAR Health System Ethics Committee provides services to the 5 hospitals and related facilities within the WELLSTAR Health System.
Evaluations from the conference indicated that participants were provided with tools and information that they could take back both to their ethics committee and to their organizations to improve their ability to provide ethical care to recipients of care.
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