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
While the conference was ultimately cancelled due to public health concerns about the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ethics SIG had prepared a panel discussion entitled: “Parent Voices in Decisions about Long Term Care in Children with Complex Medical Needs”. The session would have featured 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. While we are disappointed we were unable to offer this panel discussion in 2020, we look forward to next year’s PAS conference when our discussions of ethics issues in pediatrics can continue.
2020 Ethics Essay Contest
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 third annual joint Ethics Essay Contest. Submissions are due September 1. The contest is 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. The contest is also open to medical students who have successfully matched into one of these programs by the submission deadline. Essays should focus on the ethical issues that residents and fellows face while caring for patients or conducting research.
2019 Ethics Contest Winners
In 2019, the Section on Bioethics of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Academic Pediatric Association Ethics Special Interest Group held the first joint Bioethics 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. The winning essays were published in the AAP Section on Bioethics Fall Newsletter. Thank you to all who submitted essays, and congratulations to the following awardees: 1st Place “Untitled” by Trisha Paul, University of Minnesota; 2nd Place “The War and the Remedy” by Sevde Felek, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center; Honorable Mention: “Agree to Disagree: Decision Making in the Setting of Prognostic Uncertainty”, by Erin Rholl, Medical College of Wisconsin Affiliated Hospitals
