Since its establishment in 1995, one of the major functions of the Bioethics Center has been to provide educational programs for the local medical center community. The Bioethics Center has, over the past five years, offered a wide variety of such programs, ranging from informal ethics case conferences with clinical medical students to regional and national conferences.

In collaboration with the Ethics Education Subcommittee of the Pitt County Memorial Hospital Medical Ethics Committee, the Bioethics Center has developed and presented several programs designed especially for health care professionals working at Pitt County Memorial Hospital. The first of these, presented each year since 1995, is a one-day “core workshop” in bioethics, entitled “Ethics for Health Care Professionals.” This annual workshop provides a brief introduction to clinical ethics for hospital staff. In the morning session, Bioethics Center faculty David Resnik, J.D., Ph.D., and John Moskop, Ph.D., make informal presentations on the nature of ethics and its relation to health care, methods and principles of bioethics, the relation between law and ethics in health care, and hospital bioethics policies. In the afternoon session, a multidisciplinary panel, including a physician, nurse, hospital attorney, chaplain, and risk manager, offer brief reflections on the role of ethics in their practices. Workshop participants are then divided into small groups; each group analyzes a clinical ethics case. The groups then reconvene, report their conclusions regarding the cases, and engage with the panel members in further discussion of the cases and the issues they raise.

In 2003, the Bioethics Center and the Ethics Education Subcommittee introduced a new series of educational programs for hospital professionals. These programs, entitled “Ethics Updates,” were designed as half-day workshops focusing on specific bioethics topics. The first Ethics Update Workshop, presented on February 25, 2003, featured presentations on three topics: Codes of Ethics, by Donna Copeland, M.S.N., R.N., Chair of the Ethics Education Subcommittee; Clinical Ethics Consultation, by Ronald Perkin, M.D., M.A., Chair of the Medical Ethics Committee; and Medical Futility, by John Moskop, Director of the Bioethics Center. Questions and discussion followed each presentation.

The second “Ethics Update” workshop, on November 11, 2003, focused on multi-cultural issues in health care ethics. After an introductory presentation by John Moskop, participants at this workshop engaged in analysis of cases in which cultural differences pose clinical ethics questions, first in small groups and then with a multi-disciplinary panel of professionals.

A third Ethics Update workshop is scheduled for February 19, 2004. This workshop will examine questions of organizational ethics in health care. For additional information about this workshop, please see the announcement on page eight.