Hospitals and other health care organizations face myriad opportunities to advance their ethical commitments to health equity, including through activities that fall outside the bounds of their traditional role of caring for the sick. In recent years, for example, many hospitals have begun to fund housing programs, tackle food insecurity in their local communities, and undertake other initiatives to combat the social determinants of health inequity. As hospitals increasingly intervene on social determinants of health, how can they ensure that their entry into this space advances, rather than sets back, goals of social and health justice? This talk will focus on how hospitals and health organizations can reason through their commitments and responsibilities as ethical actors in the social realm.
Learning Objectives: After this webinar, attendees will be able to:
Identify conflicting ethical perspectives regarding hospital efforts on social determinants of health.
Appreciate the contributions of non-ideal justice theory to navigating these ethical conflicts.
Apply ethical insights to manage hospital efforts on the social determinants of health.
Kelsey N. Berry, PhD, is a Lecturer at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is the Director of the Foundations Course Sequence for the Master of Science in Bioethics and the Co-Chair of the Organizational Ethics Consortium at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. As a health policy researcher and ethicist, Dr. Berry employs empirical and normative methods to analyze health policy and support progress toward ethical systems of health and health care. The majority of her work addresses the intersection of health, population level ethics, and social justice. Special emphases of her research include the ethics of rationing scarce health resources, the distribution of responsibility for health and social determinants of health (SDOH), effective models for managing ethical questions in health care systems and organizations, and policy approaches to support the health of vulnerable populations. In tandem with her research, she educates future leaders in ethics and bioethics through her leadership of the Graduate Fellowship in Ethics at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics and her teaching in the Master of Bioethics program at Harvard Medical School. She also consults to organizations in the health sector regarding the values-based dimensions of the activities and decisions for which they are responsible and methods for making hard choices in the face of conflicting values.
Event start time: 12:00 pm
Event end time: 01:00 pm