When healthcare professionals feel constrained from acting in a patient’s best interests, moral distress ensues. The resulting negative sequelae of burnout, poor retention rates, and ultimately poor patient care are well recognized across healthcare providers. Yet an appreciation of how particular disciplines, including physicians, come to be “constrained” in their actions is still lacking. This paper will examine how the application of shared decision-making may contribute to the experience of moral distress for physicians and why such distress may go under-recognized. (...) Appreciation of these dynamics may assist in cross-discipline sensitivity, enabling more constructive dialogue and collaboration. (shrink)

Interprofessional collaboration has become accepted as an important component in today’s health care and has been guided by concerns with patient safety, quality health-care outcomes, and economics. It is widely accepted that interprofessional collaboration improves patient outcomes through enhanced communication among health-care providers and increased accessibility to services. Although there is a paucity of research that provides confirmatory evidence, interprofessional competencies continue to be incorporated into the curricula of health-care students. This article examines the ethics of interprofessional collaboration and ethical (...) issues that arise from the mainstream adoption of interprofessional competencies and the potential for moral distress in nursing. (shrink)

The idea of “postponed withholding,” proposed by Syltern et al. (2022), is a provocative one, and like all good provocative ideas, provokes deeper thinking from fresh perspectives. Our attention wa...

In a recent unit of study in an undergraduate Health Sciences pathway course, we identified a set of essays which exhibited similarity of content but demonstrated the use of bizarre and unidiomatic language. One of the distinct features of the essays was the inclusion of unusual synonyms in place of expected standard medical terminology.We suspected the use of online paraphrasing tools, but were also interested in investigating the possibility of the use of online language translation tools. In order to test (...) the outputs of these tools, we used as a seed document a corpus of text which had been provided to the students as prompt for the essay. This document was put through six free online paraphrasing tools and six separate iterative language translations through the online Google Translate™ tool.The results demonstrated that free online paraphrasing tools did not identify medical terminology as standardised or accepted nomenclature and substituted synonyms, whereas Google Translate™ largely preserved medical terminology.We believe that textual indicators such as the absence of standard discipline-based terminology may be of assistance in the identification of machine paraphrased text. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Legal scholars and business ethicists are interested in many of the same core issues regarding human and firm behavior. The vast amount of legal research being generated by nearly 10,000 law school and business law scholars will inevitably influence business ethics research. This paper describes some of the recent trends in legal scholarship and explores its implications for three significant aspects of business ethics research—methodology, theory, and policy.

Although economists often model decision makers as rational actors, the heuristics and biases literature that springs from the work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his late colleague Amos Tversky demonstrates that people make decisions that depart from the optimal model in systematic ways. These cognitive and behavioral limitations not only cause inefficient decision making, but also lead people to make decisions that are unethical. This article seeks to introduce a selected portion of the heuristics and biases and related (...) psychological literature, to highlight its implications for ethical decision making, and to serve as the basis for a lecture that could inform students regarding these matters. If business actors are on guard against errors in their own decision making processes, perhaps they can avoid some of the ethical pitfalls that recently put Enron and so many other companies in the news. (shrink)

That which constitutes a ‘good death’, or dying well, has long been of interest to philosophers and clinicians alike. While difficult to define due to its deeply personal nature and dependency on spiritual and cultural beliefs and past experiences, Wilkinson1 has drawn parallels from art and music to consider key ethical components. Few in clinical practice would dispute that a ‘good death’ is one that does not rob the person of a valuable life, is aligned with the preferences of the (...) patient and/or their family, where comfort and solace is provided, distress to family and caregivers is minimised or even that dying is not prolonged. However, what is more contentious is how tensions within the principles of a ‘good death’ should be managed or prioritised. In the context of caring for critically ill babies and children, the tension often takes the form of prolonging the dying process through providing life-sustaining interventions to meet the needs of, and to lessen the longer term distress of, the bereaved family, who must live with the decisions that are made. Though often justifiable, such interventions may result in considerable moral distress within caregivers—particularly, as often the case, when interventions are perceived by some clinicians to be of greater benefit to the family than the patient. Some clinicians may have difficulty …. (shrink)

Surgical training has traditionally involved a lengthy apprenticeship to a series of master surgeons, who teach medical students and residents the techniques of surgery while allowing them to work on patients in the operating room. This article examines surgical training as a structured environment that prepares students for the embodied lessons taught by a surgeon. It argues that even the most seemingly mechanical of surgical techniques contains social lessons when taught by a surgeon within the rich environment of the operating (...) room. (shrink)

John Hasnas’s fine article, “Up from Flatland: Business Ethics in the Age of Divergence,” fails in its stated goal of challenging the mainstream business ethics community’s methods of analyzing normative issues. However, it achieves what is likely Hasnas’s true goal of alerting both business ethicists and managers of the bigger stakes now in play when the federal government indicts employees and seeks their employers’ cooperation in establishing the prosecutor’s case. While prosecutorial overreaching is a legitimate concern that deserves to be (...) highlighted, it requires no qualitative change in normative ethical analysis. That analysis now involves different inputs (greater stakes for firms and employees), but continues to involve a familiar but complicated weighing of shareholder interests against employee interests and, sometimes, a weighing of both against the requirements of the law. (shrink)

Trust is an essential factor in online and offline transactions. However, the role of customer trust has received limited attention in the home-sharing economy. Drawing on the revised stimulus organism response model and trust transfer theory, this paper examines how customer trust in home-sharing hosts and platforms affects customer relationships, manifested in customer engagement and loyalty. As artificial intelligence is extensively utilized within home-sharing platforms to facilitate business operations and enhance the customer experience, this study also examines the influence of (...) AI on customer trust and other related outcomes. The research was undertaken in China, with respondents who had used home-sharing platforms. Results from structural equation modeling show that customer trust had a significant positive relationship with customer engagement and loyalty. Customer engagement mediates the relationship between trust and loyalty, while AI may have a negative moderating effect between host trust and customer engagement and customer engagement and loyalty. The paper contributes to marketing, sharing economy and AI research. The work has implications for practitioners offering suggestions to develop marketing strategies for business growth and sustainability. (shrink)

Moral distress is prevalent within the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and can negatively affect clinicians. Studies have evaluated the causes of moral distress and interventions to mitigate it...

A view of inequality as a relationship between the advantaged and the disadvantaged has gained considerable currency in psychological research. However, the implications of this view for theories and interventions designed to reduce inequality remain largely unexplored. Drawing on the literature on close relationships, we identify several key features that a relational theory of social change should include.

All research tools have limitations. Not all tools will be suited to every purpose. Understanding the limitations and accurately interpreting the output from any tool is essential to conducting mea...

Participants in clinical studies are frequently unable to remember study information for the duration of their participation in the research. Along with a nine-member work group and a seven-member advisory group, we determined that six elements of consent are necessary to uphold the validity of consent over time: awareness of ongoing participation; understanding the right to withdraw; understanding that withdrawal will not influence other treatment options; knowledge of the general purpose of the research; knowledge of potential risks of participation; and (...) understanding of the differences between traditional, individualized clinical care and standardized treatment during research participation. Based on these important elements, we developed an Assessment of Sustained Informed Consent as a tool to periodically review a protocol’s essential elements with its participants. We hope this will be a useful means of confirming research participants’ continued knowledge of the critical elements of consent, and of identifying those subjects who need reminding. (shrink)