Associate Director Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center New York, New York
Abstract: Clinical Ethics Consultation Services are primarily based in hospital settings and mainly address issues that arise at a patient’s bedside. However, serious ethical challenges can manifest themselves almost anywhere within a healthcare institution’s footprint -- outpatient clinics, laboratories, telehealth visits, even in hallways and elevators -- and within ‘earshot’ of staff of varying professions and experiences. Educating and empowering a multidisciplinary cadre of staff (both clinical and non-clinical) to recognize burgeoning ethical challenges and then to call upon institutional resources to address them – ideally before they reach a crisis stage – benefits everyone: patients, caregivers, and all staff.
With the goal of increasing the “Ethics footprint” and fostering a culture of preventative ethics, our institution created the Bioethics Ambassadors Program (BAP) to provide clinical and non-clinical staff with a year-long, interactive education in bioethics. Over the past four years, approximately 100 BAP participants have developed the analytic tools to help identify the common ethical challenges faced during healthcare delivery, and how to work with the institution’s Ethics Committee and Ethics Consultation Service to help mitigate many of these challenges.
How do we measure the impact of BAP? This paper presentation will briefly review the major components of the Program, followed by an in-depth discussion on how we assessed its influence on the participants and institution at-large. This will include a discussion of the quantitative and qualitative tools employed to measure how BAP students leveraged their newfound ethics knowledge and skills to raise awareness to healthcare dilemmas throughout the institution.
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