Medicine in Action – conscientious objection in medicine
This Friday, April 20, at 2:00 p.m. in Peck Hall 0405, the College of Arts and Sciences Philosophy Department at SIUE will host its final speaker. As part of the Medicine in Actions series, Holly Fernandez Lynch will talk to students and faculty about “Conscientious Objection in Medicine.” According to the Harvard website, Lynch is “a member of the inaugural cohort of academic fellows at the Petrie-Flom Center” for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at the Harvard Law School.
Rory Kraft, the first speaker in the Medicine in Action series, talks to students about informed consent. The final talk will be this Friday, April 20 at 2:00p.m.
The Medicine in Action series has covered a range of topics from informed consent to quality of life in people with disabilities to issues with moral distress. The series was constructed by Alison Reiheld, assistant professor of philosophy. Funds to bring speakers to SIUE for the series came from an Excellence in Undergraduate Education grant.
“I organized this series so that folks who have either taken medical ethics or haven’t would be able to get some exposure to topics that aren’t always covered in courses. Moral distress is one of those topics. Last semester we talked about parents giving pediatric consent and refusal for their children’s medical treatment and chronic pain and issues of treating people with disabilities,” said Reiheld.
The most recent speaker in the series was Lucia Wocial, a RN and PhD from Indiana University. Wocial spoke to a crowd of more than 100 students and faculty, many from the School of Nursing.
“I am an ethics geek. There’s really no other way to describe myself,” said Wocial. “I feel very passionately about ethics. I think very few people can be harmed by the opportunity to talk about ethically challenging stuff ad think about it.”
Wocial spoke to the audience about various issues of moral distress in the world of nursing. She walked the audience through a number of ethical situations that nurses can be confronted with in the work place, with patients, colleagues, and supervisors. Wocial presented the audience with a number of methods that many people use to deal with the moral distress on the job.
Filed Under: General CAS Stories • Philosophy
