Ethics SIG Leadership:
We would like to announce our new SIG co-chair Catherine Shubkin, MD. Dr. Shubkin is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and the Associate Program Director of the Pediatric Residency Program at Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth-Hitchcock in Lebanon, NH. Welcome, Dr. Shubkin!
Planned Ethics SIG Workshop at PAS, May 2020
The Ethics SIG has prepared a panel discussion entitled: “Parent Voices in Decisions about Long Term Care in Children with Complex Medical Needs” to be presented at the 2021 PAS Virtual Conference. The session will feature two parent stories of decision-making about long term care for their child with complex medical needs. These parents will be given the chance to tell their family’s story and then will be interviewed about their experiences with decision-making, clinician support or non-support, caring for their child, and family struggle and resilience. The session will conclude with a response and commentary from a Blyth Lord, the founder of the Courageous Parents Network, an organization that helps families whose children have life limiting conditions make choices about complex medical decisions that reflect their needs and values. The session will end with ample time for audience Q&A with all speakers. The session’s primary goal is to expose practitioners to parent experiences of decision-making for children with complex medical needs and educate practitioners on the significance of these experiences to ethical caregiving, with special attention to: how to elicit and understand parents’ values and goals; how to provide balanced information (both positive and negative dimensions) about interventions; how best to communicate recommendations; how best to communicate support to parents and children; and, how to recognize and resolve the ethical dilemmas that parents or clinicians may face in complex medical decisions.
2020 Ethics Essay Contest Winners
The Ethics Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Academic Pediatric Association (APA) and the Section on Bioethics (SOB) of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) are pleased to announce the winners of the third annual joint Ethics Essay Contest, open to all residents in pediatrics or medicine-pediatrics, and all pediatric subspecialty fellows (including fellows in pediatric surgery, pediatric psychiatry, and pediatric neurology) in North America. This year’s first place winner is Matthew Lin, MD, FAAP from Boston Children’s Hospital for his essay “Moving Beyond the Debate on Withdrawing and Withholding Life Sustaining Therapies in the NICU”. This year’s second place winner is Aleksanra Olszewski, MD, FAAP from Seattle Children’s Hospital for her essay “Maybe Life is Happening: The Power of Language in Patient Handoffs”. Thank you to all who submitted essays, and congratulations to Dr. Lin and Dr. Olszewski!
The winning essays have been published in the AAP Section on Bioethics Winter 2021 newsletter, which can be found here: https://downloads.aap.org/AAP/PDF/SOB_Newsletter-Winter2021.pdf
