Educational Resources
Ethics-related resources can help hospital administrators, healthcare providers and patients work together to create bioethics services that meet the needs of individuals and support the values of healthcare organizations and communities. Many rural hospitals, however, do not have strong and active ethics committees. Given that reality, it seems important to develop education services that are not dependent on committee structures, are applicable to community issues, and accessible to professionally diverse groups. These resources include:
- Case Studies describe typical ethics-related problems that develop in rural healthcare settings.
- Patient Safety Curriculum offers resources and tools developed through the Advancing Patient Safety Study in Rural Hospitals that was supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
- Reflective Cues for ethical decision-making helps identify the issues that develop in the case studies. The tool can be used to strengthen critical thinking skills.
- Ethical Decision-making Map helps identify the various perspectives that have to be considered when resolving ethics-related issues. In many respects, it helps identify, on a very practical level, who does what to whom and how.
- Organizational Approaches helps identify the organizational framework in which healthcare decisions are made. It helps healthcare providers understand the different standards that may be at play.
- Guide for Patient and Family Decisionmaking (pdf document) is designed to facilitate dialogue among patients, families and healthcare providers. In our studies, patients and families said they had little understanding of important issues and often did not know whom to contact when problems developed. We provide both the guide and an overview as to how the guide could be used.
- Readers theater scripts are designed to provide education and stimulate informed conversation. We began to experiment with the Readers Theater approach as a way to help translate our research into practical and accessible information. The Readers Theater technique was originally developed and pioneered at East Carolina School of Medicine. Actors read a story line that describes problems that develop when providing healthcare. Our scripts are based on the stories that emerged in our rural research studies. We have taken the most typical and often repeated incidents and they are described in the voices of physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, patients, families, and clergy. An administrator or physician may read a nurse's or a patient's lines, a patient may assume the physician's role. After the reading, the actors and audience engage in a discussion of the issues and themes. The scripts that are provided have been very well accepted by a wide variety of rural audiences. Rural healthcare providers recognize the issues and say that the script provides a way to talk about them.
