RESUMEN

In a 2005 paper about the variety of ethical conflicts third-year medical students observed, and their responses to those conflicts, a reluctance to speak up for fear of reprisal emerged as a salient finding. Based on that finding, the authors proposed that moral courage falls within the realm of professional expectations for medical students and that its cultivation is an appropriate formal objective for medical education. Since then, one of those authors has engaged in remediating trainees and practicing clinicians who have committed professional misdeeds, including failures in professionalism, ethics, and maintaining professional boundaries. The perspective gained from working with these individuals and hearing their stories, as well as concepts from behavioral science, have broadened that author's understanding of how poor professional judgments are made and misdeeds committed and expanded her appreciation for the role of moral courage. Most individuals arrive at their remedial course knowing on some level that what they did was wrong, but are incredulous at how they became capable of acting so improperly. They must learn that every student and practitioner, without exception, is at risk for committing a professional misdeed. Moral courage is required to participate in the kind of reflection and self-assessment necessary to examine one's own professional wrongdoing and practice safely and competently at all times, just as it is required to speak truth to power and risk negative consequences. The author concludes that medical educators can and should assist trainees to mitigate their risks through regularly-and courageously-assessing themselves and their circumstances with honesty and clarity to develop a mature professional identity, safeguard patients, and ultimately cherish the privilege of licensure.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

State Medical Boards (SMBs) can take severe disciplinary actions (e.g., license revocation or suspension) against physicians who commit egregious wrongdoing in order to protect the public. However, there is noteworthy variability in the extent to which SMBs impose severe disciplinary action. In this manuscript, we present and synthesize a subset of 11 recommendations based on findings from our team's larger consensus-building project that identified a list of 56 policies and legal provisions SMBs can use to better protect patients from egregious wrongdoing by physicians.

Asunto(s)

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Since ethical issues in the contemporary delivery of health care involve doctors, nurses, technicians, and members of other health professions, the authors consider whether members of diverse health care occupations might benefit from studying ethics in a single classroom. While interprofessional courses may be better at teaching the ethics of the relationships between and among the various health professions, single-professional courses may be better at teaching the ethics of relationships between particular kinds of professionals and patients. An ethics instructor's professional discipline affects his/her credibility with the students, and the course readings may not always be relevant to the actual work of a given discipline. With these challenges in mind, the authors suggest that the boundaries of ethics education in the health professions be reconceived to accommodate the professional mission of a specific discipline as well as the interdependence and collaboration that marks high quality health care.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

OBJECTIVES: In order to teach medical students to engage more fully with patients, we offer ethics education as a tool to assist in the management of patient health issues. METHODS: We propose that many dilemmas in clinical medicine would benefit by having the doctor embark on an iterative reasoning process with the patient. Such a process acknowledges and engages the patient as a moral agent. We recommend employing Kant's ethic of respect and a more inclusive definition of patient autonomy drawn from philosophy and clinical medicine, rather than simply presenting dichotomous choices to patients, which represents a common, but often suboptimal, means of approaching both medical and moral concerns. DISCUSSION: We describe how more nuanced teaching about the ethics of the doctor-patient relationship might fit into the medical curriculum and offer practical suggestions for implementing a more respectful, morally engaged relationship with patients that should assist them to achieve meaningful health goals.

Asunto(s)

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

The medical literature is replete with articles about the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education's 2003 resident duty hour restrictions. Most of these papers describe creative and thoughtful responses to the new system. However, others express concern that the "80-hour work week" could hamper continuity of care and educational activities. Nevertheless, if fatigue impairs resident learning and medical care quality, then work hour restrictions seem worthwhile. We add our voices to the critics' for additional reasons. Data support that fatigue occurs even with reasonable work schedules, and residents do not reliably use time off from work to rest. Regulated work schedules can interfere with adequate rehearsal of the physical and mental stamina required in certain specialties, yet patients have a right to expect their physicians to be trained in the particular demands of those specialties. Similarly, residents have a right to a realistic understanding of authentic clinical practice. Further, while self-sacrifice need not be routine, trainees should feel that occasional self-sacrifice is appropriate and acceptable for a physician. We reject uniform, arbitrary duty hour limits for all specialties. Rather, we propose that a subspecialty-based system can foster the development of the endurance, skills, and reasoning that patients and colleagues expect.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

"Turfing" denotes a patient transfer or triage from one physician to another when the care of that patient feels more troublesome than it is worth. A widespread phenomenon in medical training programs, turfing appears to allocate patient care to meet physicians' rather than patients' needs. Although turfing reportedly causes inter-physician discord and inter-specialty stereotyping, its deeper consequences are poorly understood. Turfing is an interpersonal conflict masquerading as a medical issue. After examining turfing alongside other patient-related slang, I analyze the distinction between "the turf," a person, and "to turf," a practice. Several explanatory models from medical practice are explored in order to illuminate turfing's implications for medical professionalism, ethics, and patient care. I suggest that a physician's medical specialty or practice type--that is, professional culture--may link to that physician's degree of altruism. If so, then what it means fundamentally to be a physician might vary across medical specialties. Such a link calls for a new notion of cultural competence, one that physicians may apply not to patients but to each other.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

PURPOSE: To systematically examine ethical conflicts reported by all State University of New York Upstate Medical University third-year students, compare them with conflicts reported in the literature, and identify content areas that compel new or renewed emphasis in national educational objectives, standard curricula, and texts. METHOD: From 1999 to 2002, all third-year students submitted papers for a required bioethics course. These papers depicted ethical issues arising during clinical clerkships. The authors devised a checklist of ethical issues; after analyzing the students' papers, the authors applied the checklist to the papers to create a taxonomy. RESULTS: Three hundred twenty-seven students submitted 688 cases involving 40 ethical issues. The most common issues were deliberate lies or deceptions (n = 68), patients' right to refuse recommended treatment (n = 48), and insistence on futile treatment (n = 46). Students perceived overt and subtle discrimination toward patients, reflected in substandard or excessive treatment. In 81 cases (12%), students expressed reluctance to speak up about moral conflict for fear of reprisal. This fear was expressed in 18 (45%) of the 40 issues-particularly student-specific (36 [52% of 69]) and quality of care (7 [24% of 29])-and most frequently in cases involving surgery (p < .025) and obstetrics-gynecology patients (p < .01). CONCLUSIONS: Students discerned ethical dilemmas in both "usual and customary" and seemingly incidental situations. Students who described fear of speaking up perceived a tradeoff between academic survival and patients' interests. The cases demonstrated that students still lacked the tools to navigate ethical dilemmas effectively. The authors propose that moral courage is within the realm of professional expectations for medical students; its cultivation is an appropriate formal objective for medical education.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

OBJECTIVES: When a physician believes that the troubles of caring for a patient outweigh the rewards, he or she can move--"turf", the unwanted patient from his or her own to another physician's territory. Physicians receiving such patients can feel burdened by, and resentful about, caring for those who are "turfed" to them by other physicians, yet little is known about the effects such "turf battles" have on patient care. This study aims to discover if "turfed" patients (TPs) experience their hospitalizations differently from patients whose admissions are perceived more favorably by their physicians. DESIGN: Semi-structured, in-depth interviews. POPULATION: Twenty Six English-speaking patients on a medical service in a tertiary care university hospital. OUTCOMES: Hospitalization experiences based on qualitative thematic analysis of interview audiotapes and transcripts. RESULTS: The experience of patients perceived as "turfs" differed from patients deemed more appropriately admitted in two areas: mode of admission and tone of interview themes. TPs were admitted via the emergency department or intra-hospital transfer; unlike the "appropriate" patients (APs), none came from outside hospitals. Although patients in both groups voiced many similar themes, nearly all TP interview themes were unfavorable. AP interviewees, by comparison expressed both favorable and unfavorable themes. TPs were direct and explicit about their anger and frustration, while APs mixed humor with complaints. CONCLUSIONS: "Turfed" patients may have different care experiences from those of patients deemed appropriate for a medical service. Inter-specialty barriers to collegiality and relationship-centered care shape physicians' perceptions of patient appropriateness and desirability and merit further large-scale exploration.

Asunto(s)