[Sent 16 July 2020 to the Surgical Ethics Education working group]
Greetings from St. Louis and WashU. For ‘Surgical Ethics Education Resources #35’, I have inserted below (and attached) a grid I created a few years ago as a two-step tool for identifying and differentiating ethically concerning decisions and/or actions in patient care --
The first step is to associate the ethically concerning decision and/or action with the relevant ethical obligation/s (i.e., the four columns in the grid) and with the relevant organizational objective/s (i.e., the four lines in the grid). The second step is to highlight/underscore the primary contributing factor/s.
I have found this grid to be useful when training ethics consult teams as well as when developing the basic skills physicians/surgeons, residents, medical students, and nurses need for seeing/analyzing the ethical dimensions of patient care. I welcome your feedback about this grid as an aid in determining the focus and strengthening the precision of ethical analysis/discussion.
Doug