Bioethics Grand Rounds

HMC Ethics Forum | A Thousand Cuts: War, Illness, and the Journey from Physician to Patient

This talk explores the long-term medical and public health consequences of war, drawing on frontline clinical experience caring for patients with complex injuries and chronic illness in a conflict setting. It also reflects on the ethical and personal impact of transitioning from physician to critically ill patient, highlighting how that experience reshapes perspective, empathy, and care delivery.

 

Objectives:

1. Examine the intersection of war, public health, and chronic illness through real-world clinical experience in Gaza.

HMC Ethics Forum | Pulse Check: Trust, Power, and the Architecture of Care

Using real patient experiences, this presentation examines how communication, documentation, and system processes shape trust and diagnostic pathways in complex care. It highlights how small moments across the healthcare system can influence patient safety and long-term engagement in care.

Objectives:

1. Recognize how early clinical assumptions and electronic health record documentation can influence patient trust and diagnostic decision-making.

HMC Ethics Forum | Part 2 - Applying a Black Feminist Epistemology to Perinatal Quality Evaluation

Applying a Black Feminist Epistemology to Perinatal Quality Evaluation

This session introduces participants to Black woman-defined theoretical frameworks that contextualize the manufactured Black maternal health crisis (at the structural level) and quality of clinical practices and behaviors (at the departmental, team, and interpersonal levels). By engaging with these frameworks, participants will gain a more accurate and precise understanding of the systemic failures contributing to violations of quality and patient safety.

Objectives:

HMC Ethics Forum | Part 1 - Positive Birth Outcomes & Harmful Birth Experiences

Positive Birth Outcomes & Harmful Birth Experiences

This session explores the contrast between institutional definitions of safety and the lived experiences of safety as defined for, by, and with Black mothers. Participants will examine how systemic structures define “being safe” and how these definitions may not align with patient experiences of “feeling safe”. The session emphasizes the importance of community wisdom in shaping perceptions of quality and safety.

Objectives:

HMC Ethics Forum: Justice and Equity: Attending to Silenced Voices in Ethics

Through analyzing the practice of land acknowledgments, this presentation seeks to inspire ethicists to acknowledge the harm of impartiality as a core concept of justice. Through engaging in self-reflection, examination of, and interrogation of the justice principle that ethics as a field can elevate silenced, marginalized, and excluded voices.

Leaving the bedside to mend the bedside: Revising HHS Consent Guidelines | HMC Ethics May Forum

This talk will discuss a bio-ethicist's paradigm of integrating community voices within policy. We will discuss case examples which reduced clinicians' moral distress and amplified patient values and preferences.

OBJECTIVES:

1. Discuss examples of bioethics successes within policymaking

2. Discuss a paradigm of integrating community voices within policy

3. Introduce a policy analysis method for ethics committee members and bio-ethicists

Legal Considerations for Critically Ill and Dying Patients Who Lack Surrogate Decision Makers | HMC Ethics April Forum

This presentation will discuss the legal framework that guides processes for ensuring that a patient’s interests are represented when determining whether to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment.

OBJECTIVES:

  1. Review Washington’s legal requirements for withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment.
  2. Recognize when a guardianship appointment or court authorization is necessary for withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment.

SPEAKERS:

Doctor, Will You Pray for Me? Medicine, Chaplains and Healing the Whole Person | Bioethics Grand Rounds

Dr. Klitzman will draw on in-depth interview research to examine how, given the political and religious polarization in our nation today, patients and family members from a wide range of backgrounds -- from evangelical to agnostic, atheist and 'nothing in particular' -- seek and find sources of meaning, connection and hope when facing serious medical illness. The book explores the challenges that doctors, chaplains and others confront in aiding patients in these journeys and ways we can improve. 

About our presenter:

“White Trauma: Creating Space for White People’s Vulnerability with The Hopes of Undoing the Perpetuation of Structural/Systemic Racism" | HMC Ethics November Forum

Sherronda Jamerson presents how racism, at its most basic level, is a lens though which people interpret, naturalize, and reproduce inequality. She explains that racism is not a “white” issue it is a systematic/structural issue designed to keep in place white cultural dominance. Learn why this system has caused harm to us all.

OBJECTIVES:

1) Maintaining openness and moving forward.

2) Learn how trauma and stress can invade the body and skew perception.  

3) Increase awareness of how unconscious or unspoken racism can compromise discussions and outcomes