Enhancing Ethics Competencies in Healthcare Professionals

Synonym(s):

Date: Friday, 27 September 2024 | Time: 2.45pm - 4.15pm | Venue: Academia, L2-S3 Expanded
Track Type: Main Conference Symposium
Speakers: Dr Voo Teck Chuan, Assoc Prof Michael DunnDr Crystal Lim, Mr Keegan Lin, Dr Peter Chow

Ethical values and considerations underpin healthcare practice and delivery. When ethical dilemmas arise due to conflicting values, healthcare providers need to engage in explicit ethical reasoning to appropriately apply ethical and legal concepts, and weigh the values and trade-offs to arrive at ethically defensible actions. Nurses, dentists, doctors, pharmacists, and allied health professionals face distinctive ethical decisions relating to patient care in their own practice. They also need to work collaboratively to resolve complex ethical issues that span disciplines and specialties.  Thus, profession-specific ethics education as well as interprofessional ethics education are now widely recognised as necessary to ensure professional practice, and safeguard patient interests and improve patient outcomes. In view of this development, the SingHealth Duke-NUS Medical Humanities Institute (SDMHI) was set up in 2023 with a bioethics arm to provide opportunities for profession-specific and interprofessional ethics education in collaboration with internal and external stakeholders.

This symposium addresses the increasing need for healthcare ethics education and training in the context of Singapore to enhance the ethical competencies of healthcare providers. It will feature talks from members of SDMHI and experienced healthcare ethics educators with diverse backgrounds in medicine, medical social work, pharmacy, and bioethics on the current and future landscapes of healthcare ethics education in Singapore and internationally, competency-based pedagogical approaches to ethics education, and challenges with curriculum design and delivery. The symposium will be of interest to nurses, dentists, doctors, allied health workers, and pharmacists who have an interest in championing a culture of ethical excellence in healthcare, and an interest in delivering ethics education within and across professions.  It will also be of interest to healthcare providers who would like to partner with SDHMI or be involved in the design and delivery of its bioethics programs.

Learning Outcome(s):

By the end of the symposium, participants will be able to:

  • Articulate the goals and approaches of competency-based pedagogy, and developments in healthcare ethics education and training. 
  • Understand the benefits and challenges, including the resources and coordination needed, of profession-specific and interprofessional ethics education.   
  • Discuss how healthcare ethics education can effectively be implemented through SDHMI in collaboration with other practitioners and educators in and beyond SingHealth.  

Target Audience:

Our target audience are nurses, dentists, doctors, allied health workers, and pharmacists who have an interest in championing a culture of ethical excellence in healthcare, and an interest in delivering ethics education.  It will also be of interest to healthcare providers who would like to partner with SDHMI or be involved in the design and delivery of its bioethics programs.  
 
No prerequisite knowledge/experience is required.
 

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