PHEN Programmes and Services

The following provides a summary of the programmes and services currently offered by PHEN listed according to each of the Network’s three primary mandates, as well as projects in the planning and needs assessment stages. 

(Updated June 2010)

Education

Annual Conference

  • Primary networking opportunity for those interested and working on ethics issues in health
  • Attended by 200-300 health care providers and administrators annually and normally over-subscribed

Article Packages

  • Packages available for purchase of relevant and timely articles as educational resources on 18 different current issues in health ethics.
  • Each package contains 5-6 articles that are meant to provide a general overview and introduction to a selected topic
  • Examples of topics: Ethics & Disability, Ethics of Pandemic Planning, Ethical Issues in Health Promotion & Population Health, Ethical Issues in Home Care

Comfort, Hopes & Wishes: Making Difficult Health Care Decisions

  • Development of an accessible and easily-readable booklet that provides brief discussions of ethical issues arising in times of critical illness
  • Available in PDF format online
  • After public consultation on the first and second drafts, feedback is being incorporated into a final draft that will be printed and distributed throughout the province in Fall 2010.

Discussion Papers

  • Development of briefs or summaries that are made available to health administrators, governors, providers and care recipients providing analysis of timely or significant health system issues from an explicit ethics perspective.

Embedded Ethicist Pilot Project

  • Ethics education and consultation services for an embedded ethicist pilot project at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre in Calgary

Ethics and Accreditation Program
  • Providing guidance and support for health organizations seeking to better understand how to meet accreditation requirements relating to ethics
  • Review of explicitly ethics-related sections of new draft CCHSA standards through discussion groups throughout Alberta facilitating feedback from the ethics community

Ethics Committee Membership & Support in Consultation

  • Membership on ethics committees and support for consultation services at several hospitals & continuing care centres 

Ethics and Pandemic Planning

  • Extensive online resources to support clinicians in making difficult ethical decisions in the event of a pandemic

Feature Article Mailout

  • Quarterly distribution, to PHEN members, of a recent, relevant article from the bioethics literature, with accompanying executive summary

Health Ethics Week

  • Provides support and resources to organizations wishing to host ethics education events
  • Highlights the importance and relevance of health ethics issues to Albertans
  • Approximately 50 bioethics educational events held across Alberta annually
  • In conjunction with University of Alberta John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre, University of Calgary Office of Medical Bioethics, Covenant Health & Alberta Health Services

Introduction to Bioethics: Distance Education Course

  • Provides intensive, high-quality ethics education regardless of geographic location of participants
  • Features interaction with a number of internationally renown bioethicists

Legislation Resources

  • Provide an online collection of resources related to new Alberta legislation, including the Adult Guardianship and Trusteeship Act, Mental Health Amendment Act and Personal Directives Act.

Library 
  • Maintaining an extensive library of books and videos that can be lent to Albertans for a three week period at no charge.

Published Resources for Sale

     Clinical Ethics Committee Member Manual

  • Designed as a thorough one-stop resource for members of clinical ethics committee

  • Includes activity suggestions and reference materials and space for and examples of committee-specific documents

  • Ethics in Healthcare: Building Competence for Health Professionals DVDs

  • Package of 12 DVDs providing intense introduction to concepts in bioethics

  • An excellent base for self-study or committee self-education

     For Goodness Sake DVD

  • Resource available via licensing arrangement with producers

  • Excellent introduction to the concept of ethics for workshops, discussion groups, etc.

  • A light-hearted introduction to why it’s good to be good

     Global Health Ethics: Duty, Justice and Responsibility DVD

  • Dr. James Dwyer, Associate Professor of Bioethics and Humanities at the State University of New York, explores our personal, professional and social responsibilities, and how we can focus more attention on issues of justice that arise at the local, national and global levels

     Introduction to Health Ethics Committees Booklet

  • Provides guidance to those who wish to develop ethics committees or ethics resources within their health organization, now in its fourth printing

     Ethics and Health Resource Allocation: A Primer for Policy-Makers

  • Originally developed for the PHEN Resource Allocation Conference, now distributed separately in response to continuing demand

  • Provides an intensive introduction to resource allocation ethics for administrators, clinician managers, board members and other policy-makers

     Spirituality in Health Care: Dialogue, Decisions and Duties DVD

  • Daniel Sulmasy, Franciscan Friar and Associate Director of MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago describes how spiritual needs encompass questions of meaning, value and relationships that are often insufficiently addressed in health care.

Resources For Teachers

  • Resources for elementary and junior high school teachers to introduce and discuss bioethics topics in the classroom

Support for Development of Ethics Resources / Committees

  • Provides consultation to those regions and organizations wishing to develop their ethics services capacity
  • Offers guidance for those wishing to meet and exceed accreditation standards for ethics

Video Library & Reviews

  • Extensive library of videos to be used for educational purposes, available to all Albertans and PHEN Members on loan at no cost
  • Reviews of several hundred health ethics videos available at libraries across the province

Workshops and Modules

  • Over 400 workshops conducted since PHEN’s inception
  • Sixteen standard modules now available to any Alberta organization, includes Ethics and: Capacity, Informed Consent, Resource Allocation, End-of-Life Issues and Disability

 

Connection 

Alberta Health Services Consultation Team

  • Bi-weekly meetings with Alberta Health Services clinical ethics staff to discuss provincial trends, best-practices and services being provided in ethics consultation throughout the province

Health Ethics Human Resource Directory

  •  Listing (with consent) of PHEN members available on PHEN website, along with areas of interest/specialty

PHEN Membership

  • Maintaining a membership of individuals and institutions with an interest in health ethics

PHEN Communiqué

  • Email newsletters sent to PHEN members on a monthly basis, providing announcements and information on bioethics events.

Regional Ethics Representative Forum

  • Annual Spring Meeting of Alberta Ethics Representatives and Clinical Ethics Committee Chairs
  • Provides an opportunity to exchange information regarding the development of local ethics services and share best practices

Website

  • Regularly updated with resources for health care administrators, providers and members of the public
  • Includes ecommerce capability for purchasing materials, registering for events and purchasing memberships on-line
  • Features resources for individuals and health organizations including listing of ethics committees in Alberta, information on pandemic planning and relevant Alberta legislation, professional development opportunities in health ethics, and much much more.
  • Revised and updated PHEN website launched in June 2010

 

Coordination

Collaborative Conferences

  • Joint conferences with other health organizations with an interest in ethics, including the Palliative Care Association of Alberta, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the College and Association of Registered Nurses and the Health Quality Council of Alberta

Ethics Consultation Secondary Review Service

  • Specially formed full ethics consultation team, with expertise from across the country, as necessary, to provide secondary review of particularly difficult ethics consults

Policy Consultations

  • Providing input into the development or review of new or existing public policy – e.g. Personal Directives Act, Dependent Adults Act, Health Information Act

Referral Service and Public Inquiries

  • Response to public, health care provider and media inquiries for information & referral through 1-800 lines


Projects In The Early Planning or Development Stages

Continuing Ethics Education and Certificate in Health Ethics 

  • Purpose is to provide incentive and structure for advancement in ethics and to work towards standardization of the requirements for being a member of an ethics committee in Alberta

  • Credits would be earned by participating in PHEN education programs or equivalencies

Ethics Committees: Developing a Bold New Vision

  • Development of a proposal to host, in collaboration with other ethics organizations from across Canada, a pre-conference, entitled Ethics Committees: Developing a Bold New Vision, at the June 2011 Canadian Bioethics Conference to be held in June 2011. The aim would be to critically review the goals, structure and activities of clinical ethics committees in Canada and to recommend a roadmap by which to improve their effectiveness.

  • Launching of a province-wide quality improvement / review program to support health zones and health organizations engage in self-assessment, quality improvement/ review and establishment of performance measures to gauge success and address weaknesses in the delivery of ethics services.


Ethics Consultation Boot Camp

  • Development of a program to provide intense training to clinical ethics committee members on conducting clinical ethics consultations

Distance Education Course In Health Ethics II

  • Development of an advanced distance education course in health ethics, for those having completed Phase I

  • Based on requests and popularity of Phase I

Organizational History

  • Development of a paper reflecting on the ‘experiment’ of PHEN in Alberta, with a view to allowing others to benefit from its successes and challenges

Resource Allocation Project

  • Designed to provide on-going and direct support to health managers, administrators and policy-makers wishing to incorporate explicit ethics criteria into decision-making processes

  • Developing toolkit that would provide practical, hand-on support for those facing resource allocation decisions

Teleconference Ethics Series

  • Organization of short bioethics educational sessions delivered via web- or teleconference providing an opportunity to hear high-quality speakers, for those who would not otherwise have access to such resources


Projects Being Considered for Feasibility / Need

(Note: These are projects for which a possible need has been identified but whose feasibility, value and priority have not yet been sufficiently determined)

Bioethics Education Through The Arts

  • Dissemination of materials developed by playwrights that can be adapted for use by Ethics Committees for Bioethics education

Bioethics For The People Conference

  • Hosting of an international conference designed to explore how to engage members of the public in bioethics dialogue and decision-making

Enhanced Bioethics Week Materials for Teachers

  • Develop enhanced resources for teachers to incorporate ethics into lesson plans
  • Coordinated with Bioethics Week

Ethics and Disability Forum

  • Development of a joint project, possibly in conjunction with community disability organization(s), to facilitate, and address concerns arising from, meaningful dialogue between members of the disability and bioethics communities

Ethics Consultation Broker Service

  • Exploration of the feasibility of a program designed to provide RHAs with swift access to ethics consultation services on a fee-for-service basis.

Mental Health Ethics Project

  • Developing tools and educational materials to provide support to care professionals in addressing complex mental health ethics issues

Rocky Mountain Summer Ethics Institute

  • A two to three-day retreat in an relaxed setting for providers or administrators in health care to consider and discuss ethical issues in health care