In this episode, Kirk and Amelia speak with Dr. Deepshikha Ashana about her research on racial disparities present in shared decision-making practices in critical care. Dr. Ashana shares how her research interests were motivated by her personal observations of racial disparities, from her childhood in India, her experience moving to the US, and her education in Philadelphia. Her recent research thematically analyzed audio recordings of conversations between families and clinicians of critical care patients, using inductive analysis to identify four ways that communication behaviors differed in ..read more

Amelia and Kirk chat with Dr. Mark Kuczewski, Professor of Medical Ethics at Loyola University, Chicago. In this episode, they discuss his recent article https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/nonprofit-health-care-behaves-badly-case-mission-leaders-ombudsmen in which Dr. Kuczewski elucidates the challenges nonprofit healthcare employees face as workplace culture becomes increasingly corporatized and the importance of counterweights– in the form of ombudsmen, better-designed incentive structures, and virtuous local board members– who can potentially help promote the nonprofit mission ..read more

Kirk and Amelia had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Anita L. Allen, the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. In this episode, they discuss Dr. Allen’s experiences working on President Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues  where she engaged in deliberative democracy approaches to explore challenges with advances in biomedicine, technology and synthetic biology. A highlight of her time there  included a report titled “Ethically Impossible”  that documented and acknowledged gross human res ..read more

Dr. Stephen Hargarten is a Professor of Emergency Medicine, Associate Dean for Global Health, Director of the Global Health Pathway, and Director of the Comprehensive Injury Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin. His research interests reflect an intersection of injury and violence prevention and health policy to address the burden of this biosocial disease. He was the founding President of the Society for the Advancement of Violence and Injury Research and has served on the Violence and Injury Prevention Mentoring Committee for the World Health Organization. In his conversation with Amel ..read more

Amelia and Kirk have a broad-ranging discussion with Adira Hulkower, the Director of Clinical Ethics at the Montefiore Einstein Center for Bioethics in the Bronx. She shares her experiences as a clinical ethics consultant applying the concept of Dignity of Risk to better understand the ethical implications of discharge planning for patients experiencing homelessness. They discuss healthcare institutional responsibilities related to social determinants of health broadly as well as to individual patients. The importance of intersectionality and patient narratives are explored ..read more

We are joined by Rachel Fabi, PhD, Associate Professor of Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University. She is a Faculty Research Affiliate at the Syracuse University Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion. She received her Ph.D. in Health Policy and Management, in the Bioethics and Health Policy track, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and served as the 2019-2021 National Academy of Medicine Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics.Dr. Fabi shares her insights on policies that affect the health of immigrants and refugees in the United States, and discusses her res ..read more

We kick off Season 5 with the phenomenal Dr. Keisha Ray, who received her PhD in philosophy, with a focus on bioethics, from the University of Utah. She is currently a tenured Associate Professor with the McGovern Center for Humanities & Ethics at UT Health Houston, where she also serves as the Director of the Medical Humanities Scholarly Concentration. Kirk and Amelia chat with her about new book Black Health. Listen to our discussion with Dr. Ray on the importance of writing for pre-health students, undergraduates and high school students to teach folks early on about institutional racis ..read more

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. David Kountz, MD, MBA, FACP who is the Chief Academic Officer and Vice President of Academic Diversity for Hackensack Meridian Health, a 17 hospital network in Northern and Central New Jersey. Kirk and Amelia explore a range of strategies to promote equity in clinical care with Dr. Kountz, including the importance of pipeline programs to enhance the diversity of the clinician pool and tying organizational quality metrics to equity outcomes in order to enhance quality of care. We also explore what ethical obligations physicians may have to advocate for equi ..read more

We reached out to Dr. Nathaniel Morris after reading his recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine; Injustice Disorder. Dr. Morris is currently an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco and provides care to incarcerated patients in the San Francisco jail system. He has published numerous journal articles on mental health care in jails and prisons, the criminalization of people with mental illness and addiction, and other topics in psychiatry and the law. Other publications include; Cell Front: The House Calls of Mass Incarceration i ..read more

Amelia and Kirk speak with Tim Schwab, an investigative journalist based in Washington DC whose work has appeared in The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, the British Medical Journal and other outlets. https://about.me/tim_schwab. Today's episode is all about philanthropy and power, and the ethical implications of this facet of concentrated wealth. We discuss implications for public health https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gates-covid-data-ihme/, vaccine distribution and more, while examining how this type of philanthropy perpetuates existing power structures and undermines healt ..read more