HMC Ethics Forum | “The Ones We Can’t Fix”: Using Structural Competency to Think About Hard Ethics Cases

Join us on Wednesday, October 8th @ 12PM with Sara Kolmes, PhD, HEC-C, for a discussion of “The Ones We Can’t Fix”: Using Structural Competency to Think About Hard Ethics Cases. 

Some of the hardest ethical dilemmas in healthcare are ones in which a patient is in pain, but nothing in the power of healthcare professionals can get at the source of the problem. Some patients are sick or will be sick again because of external forces that we can’t impact, don’t have the resources they need at home to get better, have faced trauma that impacted them in ways that may never heal, or they are not able to trust our advice and ignore it. One way to think through these cases is by trying to understand the outside-of-hospital sources of these problems, which can help reduce moral distress and self-blame, direct our energy in productive ways, and help highlight what we can do for the patients in front of us right now. We will look at how to think about structural forces in ‘stuck’ parts of patient care in a way that’s practical, how this might be useful, and work through some examples of how to investigate this in a case.

Objectives:

1. Identify cases in which structural forces are impacting a patient’s outcomes,

2. Seek to identify what is and is not possible in response to these cases,

3. Understand their own and patient experiences of these cases, and

4. Reduce moral distress by understanding what is happening in cases in which things feel ‘stuck’.

Speaker Bio:

Sara Kolmes is the Senior Clinical Ethicist for Eastern Washington and Montana for Providence St Joseph Health. She trained at Georgetown for her PhD and Wellstar Health System in Georgia for her clinical ethics fellowship. Her research focuses on bridging communication gaps between clinicians and patients when where medical mistrust or religious differences make it difficult to work together.

Please note that a UW Login is required to view the recording: