Abstract
An eighteen-month-old girl’s death from dehydration in 2010 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore provides a sobering example of the need for interprofessional ethics training. In a New York Times interview, Dr. Peter Pronovost, medical director of the Quality and Safety Research Group at the hospital, admitted, “We had dysfunctional teamwork because of an exceedingly hierarchal culture. When confrontations occurred, the problem was rarely framed in terms of what was best for the patient” (March 9, 2010). Lives are lost sometimes, in other words, on account of poor teamwork. Hence, promoting effective teamwork is an ethical imperative. Teaching a coherent and consistent clinical and research ethics framework that is shared by all professions, in an interprofessional setting, will allow bioethics to be more successfully integrated into the work of all health care professionals. This chapter proposes a brief history of bioethics broken into three periods: a “golden age” when foundational texts and institutions first appeared, a “silver age” in which the ideas spread to all medical specialties and to all other health professions, and a new epoch of interprofessional healthcare ethics that began in the 21st century. This book is one of the first to explicitly address the outlines of interprofessional ethics, and propose cases to help develop understanding of the field.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The patient safety movement, and the concern to find ways to reduce errors was greatly stimulated by the publication of To Err Is Human by the Institute of Medicine, IOM, National Academy Press, 2000.
- 2.
Especially the Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in African Americans.
- 3.
M.H. Pappworth, Human Guinea Pigs. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1967. H. Beecher, “Ethics and Clinical Research,” New Eng J Med, 274: 1354–1360.
- 4.
See Content Directives 10, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Brajtman, S., D. Wright, P. Hall, S.H. Bush, and E. Bekele. 2012. Toward better care of delirious patients at the end of life: A pilot study of an interprofessional educational intervention. Journal of Interprofessional Care 26(5): 422–425.
Deneckere, S., M. Euwema, C. Lodewijckx, M. Panella, T. Mutsvari, W. Sermeus, and K. Vanhaecht. 2013. Better interprofessional teamwork, higher level of organized care, and lower risk of burnout in acute health care teams using care pathways: A cluster randomized controlled trial. Medical Care 51(1): 99–107.
Freeth, D., and Interprofessional Education. 2007. Association for the study of medical education. Scotland, UK: Edinburgh.
Hoffman, S.J., and D. Harnish. 2007. The merit of mandatory interprofessional education for pre-health professional students. Medical Teacher 29(8): e235–e242.
Owen, J., T. Brashers, C. Peterson, L. Blackhall, and J. Erickson. 2012. Collaborative care best practice models: A new educational paradigm for developing interprofessional educational (IPE) experiences. Journal of Interprofessional Care 26(2): 153–155.
Pronovost, P., S. Berenholtz, T. Dorman, P.A. Lipsett, T. Simmonds, and C. Haraden. 2003. Improving communication in the ICU using daily goals. Journal of Critical Care 18(2): 71–75.
Shaw, S.N. 2008. More than one dollop of cortex: Patients’ experiences of interprofessional care at an urban family health centre. Journal of Interprofessional Care 22(3): 229–237.
Stone, N. 2006. Evaluating interprofessional education: the tautological need for interdisciplinary approaches. Journal of Interprofessional Care 20(3): 260–275.
Yarborough, M., T. Jones, T.A. Cyr, S. Phillips, and D. Stelzner. 2000. Interprofessional education in ethics at an academic health sciences center. Academic Medicine 75(8): 793–800.
Acknowledgments
Nathan Carlin from the McGovern Center at UTH was especially helpful in the drafting of this chapter, and deserves special acknowledgment as a co-author for his contributions to this chapter.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Spike, J.P., Lunstroth, R. (2016). A Very Brief History of Health Care Ethics: Four Decades from the Golden Age of Bioethics to the Dawn of Interprofessional Ethics. In: A Casebook in Interprofessional Ethics. SpringerBriefs in Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23769-5_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23769-5_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-23768-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23769-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)