About Us
The focus of work in the Dalhousie Department of Bioethics is ethics in and of healthcare practice. This translates into a strong commitment to education of learners in the health professions as well as a series of collaborations with health care organizations that are aimed at (1) enhancing the capacity and confidence of health care providers as they address the ethics questions they encounter in their everyday practice and (2) providing a consistent approach to addressing ethical questions in health care in Nova Scotia.
In the course of doing our work, we realized that there wasn’t a resource available that captured the key insights that we have gained in the course of teaching medical, nursing, and social work students as well as adult learners across the the health professions. This reflects some of our learning and we hope that it also provides opportunities for further discussion and evaluation of ethics consultation approaches and processes.
This resource was developed to support work with learners in the health professions and health care providers already in practice, but the intended audience also includes learners outside of the health professions who are interested in health ethics consultation as well as others who provide ethics consult services.
History
Participants in our ethics consultation education sessions would often ask if they could “watch” a consult being done in order to support their learning. Behind this request we sensed a desire for a realistic but low stakes experience of ethics consultation. In our experience, however, we found that participants learned more from experiences such as role playing that were immersive but, importantly, forced them to respond to the situation and make choices, than experiences such as reading through a transcript of a consultation session. Role playing, however, is often resisted and so we set out to create a way to satisfy this need for a realistic, low-stakes consultation experience that nonetheless forced participants to engage more deeply in the process through making choices and experiencing consequences.
This resource was developed in collaboration with students in the Community Outreach Course in the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University. Several teams of dedicated students worked to translate our vision of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book about ethics consultation into the resource you see here.
Others have provided feedback at various stages of this project. We very much appreciate the thoughtful comments provided by participants in the Dalhousie Department of Bioethics’ Works in Progress series, an audience at the Canadian Bioethics Society Conference in 2017, and attendees at the New Scholarship in Bioethics Symposium in 2017.