(Re)Centering: The Eighth Annual Northwestern Bioethics and Medical Humanities Conference

Overview

The Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities and the Medical Humanities & Bioethics Graduate Program are excited to announce this one-day conference dedicated to engaging the Northwestern and Chicagoland community in the rich, multidisciplinary research and scholarship of our field.

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Keynote Presentations

MORNING KEYNOTE PANEL

Why Clinical Ethics Matters, Now More than Ever

Jeanne Wirpsa (Northwestern Memorial Hospital), Erin Paquette (Lurie Childrens), and Preya Tarsney (Shirley Ryan AbilityLab)

The professional discipline of clinical ethics faces unique challenges and opportunities at this pivotal time in U.S. history as market forces and political ideologies threaten to dramatically reconfigure what healthcare looks like, how it is delivered, and whose needs will be prioritized.  This plenary will feature a panel of directors from clinical ethics programs at three diverse healthcare institutions who reflect on two questions: 1. Why clinical ethics programs will play a key role in ensuring a viable future for patient-centered, culturally sensitive, and just care, and 2. What they need to embrace, steer clear of, or incorporate into their programs to optimize that role.

LUNCHTIME KEYNOTE PANEL

Bioethics Education Across Careers: Beyond the Sage on the Stage

Angira Patel, Megan Crowley-Matoka, and Tod Chambers

The understanding and practice of clinical ethics is important at all stages of a health professional's career. The delivery of an ethics and medical humanities curriculum is heterogeneous across disciplines and institutions. This plenary will feature directors from educational ethics and medical humanities programs that deliver curricula to undergraduate medical students, graduate medical trainees, and students in a master's degree program. They will present a brief summary of their programs. Additionally, students representing all three spaces will reflect on two questions: 1. Why is ethics and medical humanities education important at their stage in career, and 2. What has been the impact of the ethics and medical humanities education they have received?

Other Programming

Additionally, four panels of presenters—including clinicians, graduate students, medical students, and researchers—will explore the theme and other topics within bioethics and medical humanities.

SESSION 1:  ETHICAL RECENTERINGS

• Arian Nouraee - Navigating Ethical Considerations for Newly Arrived Children in Rare Disease Genetics Research
• Krys Springer - Grief-Informed Medical Ethics: A Person-Centered Approach
• Cassandra Iroz - Centering Patients and Families in a Quality Improvement Collaborative
• Olivia Orr - (Re)Centering the Clinician and Patient: A Comparative Analysis of Shared Decision-Making and Related Constructs
  
  

SESSION 2:  RELATIONAL RECENTERINGS

• Lauren Dowden - Re-Centering the Relationship – Adjusting to Relational Changes in Dementia Care
• Carolyn Woodruff - AI in Dementia Care: an Ecological Approach
• Kathryn J. LaRoche - Centralizing expertise and burden in abortion-related care: How a state ban erodes the integration imperative
• Mira Raju & Sawyer Lucas-Griffin - Care Beyond Empathy
  
  

SESSION 3: CENTERING ARTS AND HUMANITIES

• Payal Patel & Ajita Nair - Bringing the Reactivity of Indian Classical Arts into Medicine
• Anna Maria Gramelspacher - Re-centering Our Focus: How Visual Thinking Strategies Can Be Used to Teach Medical Residents to Maintain Focus, Communicate Empathically and Accept Ambiguity
• Faith Chadwick - Cicatrize: The Unseen Scars We Carry
• Ari Halle - Scientific Fantasy? How The Imagined Centers The Practice Of Science
• Payton Trimark - Development of a medical Nazism seminar for formation of history-informed professional identity and growth
  
  

SESSION 4: RECENTERING ATTENTION 

• Elissa Larkin & Genevieve Ramos - Communication Disability and Justice in Healthcare: (Re)centering the Voices of People with Lived Experience
• Amy McArthur - (re)Centering the perceived valence of disability: an example from breast cancer survivorship for young women
• Rose Flanigan - Recentering a Disability Perspective when Teaching about Patient H.M.
• Martha Burla, MPH - Ask Patients Now – Centering the patient’s voice in healthcare

Schedule

8:00-8:15: Check in
8:15-8:30: Opening remarks
8:30-9:30: Morning Keynote
9:30-9:45: Break
9:45-10:45: Session 1
10:45-11:00: Break
11:00-12:00: Session 2
12:00-12:30: Break to grab lunch
12:30-1:30: Lunchtime Keynote
1:30-1:45: Break
1:45-3:00: Session 3
3:00-3:15: Break
3:15-4:15: Session 4
4:15-4:25: Closing remarks

Venue

Baldwin Auditorium in the Lurie Research Building (not to be confused with the nearby Lurie Children’s Hospital). 303 E Superior St, Chicago, IL

Theme

Increasingly individuals, clinicians, professionals, institutions, and professional fields are pulled in multiple directions, with demands on time mounting and boundaries between our commitments blurring. New technologies and innovations shift medical possibilities; domestic policies and world events change patient populations; and politics and legislation affect medical practices. How do we find and hold equilibrium? How do we know where to focus? How and what do we center?

Centering can be a personal process, drawing thoughts inward to foster mindfulness, calming ourselves, and focusing our attention. Centering might be an act for others, when we choose to prioritize others’ experiences or needs. Centering can also be an act of framing, or agenda-setting that directs our attention to specific issues or priorities. A Center itself could be an origin, a core, a concept, or a destination. 2025 marks the 10th anniversary of the Northwestern Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities. As we reflect on the past decade as well as future directions, we invite you to share what centering—or recentering—means in your professional life, your practice, medicine, and healthcare. How might we align or reframe priorities? What does is mean to center or recenter patients or communities in an ever-evolving healthcare environment? How can bioethics and medical humanities (re)center thought and engagement in medicine, healthcare, and public health?

For More Information

Please contact: Myria Knox, p-knox@northwestern.edu