Incorporating Ethics

Incorporating Ethics

Incorporating Ethics

Translating Values into Action

This website is dedicated to helping people make more ethically justified decisions—and thereby live better, more integrated lives.

How we approach and make decisions is directly tied to how we understand what life is all about.

This includes how we understand the meaning of our relationships to one other.

It also includes how we understand our relationships to the natural world.

My name is Bashir Jiwani.

I am the Lead Ethicist and Executive Director of Ethics and Diversity Services for Fraser Health, a large regional health authority in Southern British Columbia, Canada. I spend a lot of time helping individuals, teams, and organizations think through difficult choices.

Ethics is about thinking carefully about what should matter in life and then acting to bring these values alive. This is best done with other people.

Through my study and work with a variety of academic, professional, and civil society organizations, and with the help of many, many people, I have been involved in the creation of a number of decision-support tools and resources. While I work in health care, I believe the thinking behind the tools and the tools themselves can be helpful in a variety of contexts.

This website is a vehicle for providing access to these tools. I hope this will make a small contribution to how we deal with the issues we face every day.

To read more about the basic approach, click here.

I hope you will find the website useful and thought-stimulating.

Thanks for visiting,
Bashir

Moral Reasoning
System-Level Decision-Making
Diversity & Pluralism
Ethics as Interpretation
Moral Reasoning

  • Moral reasoning describes a process of critical thinking that is based on analysis of values and investigation of facts.
  • Making choices well involves thinking critically and systematically and treating those involved with respect through the process.

Resources:

System-Level Decision-Making

  • System-level decisions are decisions about policies, procedures, practice standards and strategies.
  • They are made on behalf of teams and institutions.
  • They create the frame within which individuals practice–and have an enormous impact on the ability of individuals to live with integrity.

Resources/links:

Diversity & Pluralism

  • Diversity is a fact in today’s world. In all parts of contemporary life we live with, work alongside and serve people who are different from ourselves. Making ethically justified decisions requires working well in this context.
  • Crucial to responding effectively is the value of pluralism – seeing difference as a strength and working to respond to challenges in collaboration with others so we can find common solutions to shared problems in a way that doesn’t require us to compromise what is essential to us.
  • We are thinking through what this means practically. We do know that this pluralism requires understanding and skill.
  • The websites below are resources that share thinking on both of these areas.

Resources:

Ethics as Interpretation

  • Living with integrity describes the interpretive exercise of understanding and negotiating the systems of values and beliefs that we encounter every day.
  • Human beings are physical, spiritual, mental beings embedded in the world.
  • Part of our rational process is putting life’s experience into words–making up our own stories about who we are and what life is about.
  • We don’t always know our stories. Our stories are not always consistent –and they change over time. And others influence our stories of ourselves.
  • We have power to shape our stories. Our stories can shape who we become.
  • Living with integrity describes the interpretive exercise of understanding and negotiating the systems of values and beliefs that we encounter every day.
  • Video: BC Kidney Days presents Dr Bashir Jiwani. Keeping it Together: When the Pandemics Pulls Us Apart

Moral Distress

  • Definition
  • Link to integrity
  • Diff between decision-making and moral distress tools
  • Limits to what MD can do
  • Mention complexity of language (distress, residue, injury, resilience etc.)

Resources/links:

Leadership

  • Define ethical leadership
  • Creating space and conditions for hard conversations
  • Creating psychological safety
  • Clarity of vision
  • Enabling living with integrity

Resources/links:

Through a Shia Ismaili Muslim Lens

Parenting

  • TEDx talk
  • University exercise?
  • Slides on teaching children ethics?

Covid

Building Ethics Resources

  • Fraser Health’s approach to providing clinical and organizational support was established in 2005 with the creation of Fraser Health Ethics Services.
  • Fraser Health has a framework for raising and addressing ethically challenging issues and questions. The framework includes services for supporting clinical/bedside issues across the continuum of care, system level issues (for developing policies, practice guidelines, and strategies), decision-making tools and resources. Consults can be requested by anyone in the organization including patients and patients’ families/loved ones. The framework includes steps for systematic analysis of issues against values (criteria).
  • The ethics framework that has been developed is becoming increasingly comprehensive and better resourced since that time. The department now includes support for addressing issues of diversity. The ethics framework includes tools, education resources, clinical and system level consultation services, and community engagement resources and mechanisms.

Resources/links:

Clinical Ethics Consultation

  • Write Intro

Resources/links:

Citizenship

Citizenship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNdkyRWPaEs