JOURNAL OF ADVANCED NURSING: Quinn Grundy, PhD, RN and co-authors conducted a global analysis of sponsorship of national nursing professionals associations and their major conferences. They found sponsorship is concentrated in North America and Europe and among specialties that have a high rate of technology adoption. Notable was that the medical device industry has a much stronger presence than the pharmaceutical industry, which does show up strongly among oncology associations.
DENVER GAZETTE: "One key lesson from the pandemic is that states should have criteria they follow that would automatically prompt the issuance of (crisis standard) guidance, rather than hoping that the Governor will recognize a crisis in time and have the political will to act on it," said Center Director Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH. "We’ve seen over and over that most governors won’t."
COLORADO PUBLIC RADIO: “Medical aid in dying was enacted a few years ago, and it's one of the most contentious health policy and bioethics issues,” said CBH Research Director Eric G. Campbell, PhD. Campbell and colleagues surveyed 300 Colorado physicians, revealing that while an overwhelming majority of physicians were willing to refer patients for MAiD, less than half (48 percent) were willing to act as a consulting physician. And only 28 percent were willing to act as an attending physician. A key finding from the respondents was a lack of knowledge. That was followed closely by concerns about emotional and time investment. “One of the conclusions of our research is that there's a need for physician education," Campbell said.
The CUT: "Western cultures have long been obsessed with the idea of other people malingering," says Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD, a public-health ethicist and faculty at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. "This fixation on separating “real” suffering from “fake” has led doctors, psychotherapists, policymakers, and even friends and family to dismiss the reality of others’ chronic pain, especially when it has afflicted women, children, the elderly, the poor, and people of color."
CALIFORNIA NEWS TIMES: Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD explains, “The stigma is upstream, a structural phenomenon, caused by the same kind of thing that promotes structural inequality throughout our society. Things like racial and gender discrimination, class discrimination and disability discrimination-all these kinds of things that generally promote inequality also promote stigma.“
THE ATLANTIC: “It’s an understandable response out of frustration and anger, and it is completely contrary to the tenets of medical ethics, which have stood pretty firm since the Second World War,” said Matthew Wynia, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. “We don’t use the medical-care system as a way of meting out justice. We don’t use it to punish people for their social choices.” Historian, ethicist and CBH Associate Professor Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD concurs, "It is a fundamental principle of modern medicine that everyone has an equal claim to relief from suffering, no matter what they’ve done or haven’t done,”
NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: Each year, The NIH Office of Disease Prevention recognizes one early-career prevention scientist who has made outstanding research contributions to their respective field and is poised to become a future leader in prevention research. Christine Baugh, PhD, MPH is th 2022 ODP Awardee.. Dr. Baugh is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. She conducts multidisciplinary research at the intersection of health, policy, ethics, and sport. Much of her work focuses on the primary, secondary and tertiary prevention of concussions and other sports injuries. Dr. Baugh is the author of 70 peer-reviewed research articles that have been collectively cited over 8,000 times in literature
STAT: Harvard researcher and CBH collaborator Lisa I. Iezzoni, studies health care disparities for people with disability. In this First Opinion, Dr. Iezzoni shares her personal experiences of feeling dissatisfied, not recieving the same quality health care as people without disability. Her recent research in Health Affairs, co-authored by Eric G. Campbell and Julie Ressalam, found that just 56.5% of doctors strongly agreed that they welcomed patients with disabilities into their practices, and only 40.7% of doctors surveyed reported feeling very confident about their ability to provide the same quality of care to patients with disabilities.
WASHINGTON POST: Intensive care units are full and regular hospital floors are “bursting at the seams” as people stream into emergency departments. But not all cases that arrive are true emergencies. Center Director Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH, who helped write Colorado's crisis standards of care said, “What’s changed is EMS can now come and say, ‘You know, we’d normally bring you into the emergency department, but you don’t meet the criteria given the current surge.' Patients with less-urgent needs may be taken to urgent-care centers and other alternative sites when appropriate, according to the guidelines."
THE OREGONIAN: “It’s human nature that people don’t want to acknowledge that terrible things are happening,” said Dr. Matthew Wynia, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. “Particularly in a competitive system, you’re not going to have one of them say, ‘Look we’re harming patients right now because we’re overwhelmed.’ Everyone ends up saying we’re close but we’re not hurting anyone yet, when in fact patients are being hurt right now.”
NATURE: CBH Senior Scientist, Lisa Bero, PhD, suggests universities, journals and publishers should implement data checks sooner rather than later. This means sharing information as well as technical resources, such as expertise in statistical and software tools to detect anomalies. They must also make fraud-detection tasks routine. Too often, investigations focus on pinning down blame, or sweeping misconduct under the rug. Only through a widespread community effort can we ferret out fraud.
JOURNAL OF GENERAL INTERNAL MEDICINE: Eric G. Campbell, Matthew DeCamp, Hilary Lum and co-authors surveyed 543 physicians to understand the experiences and perspectives of MAiD providers in Colorado. Their findings show that while those who have participated in MAiD largely report the experience to be emotionally fulfilling and professionally rewarding, both those who have participated and those who have not report several critical barriers to participation, especially around clinical knowledge, time and emotional investments, and professional ethics concerns.
NEW YORK TIMES: There is a greater menu of Covid pills and infusions now than at any point in the pandemic. The problem is that the supplies of those that work against the Omicron variant are extremely limited. Unvaccinated people are at far greater risk of hospitalization or death from Covid. But giving them priority access to treatments leaves people feeling “like you are rewarding intransigence,” said Center Director Dr. Matthew Wynia.
AMA JOURNAL OF ETHICS: Why Does Medical Participation in the Holocaust Still Matter? by Tessa Chelouche, MD and Matthew K. Wynia, MD, MPH, was the 6th most read article in the AMA Journal of Ethics Top Ten of 2021. The #6, #7 and #8 most read articles all were from the January 2021 issue, "Legacies of the Holocaust in Health Care."
HEALTH AFFAIRS: Lisa I. Iezzoni, Eric G. Campbell, Julie Ressalam and co-authors surveyed of 714 US physicians in outpatient practices, 35.8 percent reported knowing little or nothing about their legal responsibilities under the ADA, 71.2 percent answered incorrectly about who determines reasonable accommodations, 20.5 percent did not correctly identify who pays for these accommodations, and 68.4 felt that they were at risk for ADA lawsuits.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BIOETHICS: Authors Rachel Fabi and Daniel S. Goldberg contend that bioethics funders’ focus on genetics, genomics, neuroethics, and the ethics of other emerging technologies disproportionately harms People of Color, who are more likely to experience inequities in health care and the social determinants of health. Neglecting to fund bioethics research into questions of population health in favor of flashier topics means that ethical questions about the root causes of, for instance, the egregiously high rates of maternal mortality among Black women in the United States are less fundable and therefore less likely to receive scholarly attention. They conclude that our community must endeavor to lift up the voices of those most affected by health inequities, including through community-based participatory research and other methods that bring to the fore the lived experiences of the victims and survivors of social injustice.
HEALTH AFFAIRS: Physicians’ Perceptions Of People With Disability And Their Health Care, co-authored by Eric G. Campbell, PhD and Julie Ressalam
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NATIONAL ACADEMY OF MEDICINE: Duty to Plan: Health Care, Crisis Standards of Care, and Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, co-authored by Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH, was the National Academy of Medicine's 9th most read perspective paper in 2021, and was in the top 5% of all 2021 research articles scored by Altmetric. The paper was cited by over 100 national news outlets and read in 8 countries besides the US.
THE CONVERSATION & SALON: Center Director Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH believes that by the end of December, our health system in Colorado could be 10% over capacity across all our hospitals, in both intensive care units and regular floors. When hospitals are full, we are forced into making triage decisions, but unlike last spring, the situation has changed. Today our hospitals have plenty of ventilators, but not enough staff to run them. Stress and burnout are taking their toll.
BOSTONIA: Warren Binford travels the world advocating for children who are trafficked, abused, traumatized, exploited, or forced to migrate because of violence, poverty, or the climate crisis. Binford “comes with a whole host of skills you don’t appreciate until you see how she sits down and works with children,” says Michael Garcia Bochenek, who wrote the foreword to Hear My Voice. “To put children at ease and elicit information without coercion, to make it participatory, is amazing to watch. She’s a force of nature.”