Professionalism in the context of providing elective services: reflecting on bias.

We examine the provision of elective pronunciation services, such as intelligibility enhancement, to non-native speakers by speech language pathologists (SLPs). Practices associated with the 'modification' of non-native accent raise significant professionalism questions about bias for SLPs and healthcare professionals. These questions arise partly due to the socio-cultural context in which SLPs practice and their clients live, and the relational nature of communication. We argue that due to the ambiguity inherent in accent modification practices, SLPs must weigh a variety of considerations before determining the circumstances in which such services are professionally acceptable. Our argument is rooted in consideration of the complex nature of professionalism related to communication. After surveying potentially relevant models from other healthcare professions and finding them wanting, we support our position in light of current literature on topics such as accounts of functionality. We conclude by generalizing our anti-bias recommendations to interprofessional healthcare professionalism.

Assessing the performance of ChatGPT in bioethics: a large language model's moral compass in medicine.

Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) has been a growing point of interest in medical education yet has not been assessed in the field of bioethics. This study evaluated the accuracy of ChatGPT-3.5 (April 2023 version) in answering text-based, multiple choice bioethics questions at the level of US third-year and fourth-year medical students. A total of 114 bioethical questions were identified from the widely utilised question banks UWorld and AMBOSS. Accuracy, bioethical categories, difficulty levels, specialty data, error analysis and character count were analysed. We found that ChatGPT had an accuracy of 59.6%, with greater accuracy in topics surrounding death and patient-physician relationships and performed poorly on questions pertaining to informed consent. Of all the specialties, it performed best in paediatrics. Yet, certain specialties and bioethical categories were under-represented. Among the errors made, it tended towards content errors and application errors. There were no significant associations between character count and accuracy. Nevertheless, this investigation contributes to the ongoing dialogue on artificial intelligence's (AI) role in healthcare and medical education, advocating for further research to fully understand AI systems' capabilities and constraints in the nuanced field of medical bioethics.

Nursing ethics as a distinct entity within bioethics: Implications for clinical ethics practice.

The question of whether nursing ethics is a distinct entity within bioethics is an important and thought-provoking one. Though fundamental bioethical principles are appreciated and applied within the practice of nursing ethics, there exist distinct considerations which make nursing ethics a unique subfield of bioethics. In this article, we focus on the importance of relationships as a distinguishing feature of the foundation of nursing ethics, evidenced in its education, practice, and science. Next, we consider two objections to our claim of distinctiveness: first, that nursing ethics is merely an application of bioethical principles; second, that many bioethical subfields emphasize relationships. We respond by highlighting that throughout nursing education and generally in every career path that follows, the creation and nurturing of relationships is emphasized. Compassion and respect for the dignity of every patient is the framework upon which these therapeutic relationships are built. Much of the focus of nursing science rests on creating meaningful interpersonal experiences and human connection. After responding to each objection, we turn to the implications of this distinctiveness on clinical ethics practice, arguing that the strengths of our approach outweigh the limitations. The deep emphasis on creating meaningful interpersonal experiences and human connection supports a greater integration of relationships and social contexts into the evaluation of whether an action is ethically permissible, which is an important benefit in addressing the challenging human situations that patients face. Moreover, this perspective allows nurse ethicists to account for diverse and complex social structures and their influence in making ethical determinations. These strengths outweigh the limitations of potential inconsistencies between nurse and non-nurse clinical ethicists on the same service, a result we attribute to nursing ethics-and, in turn, the practice of the nurse ethicist-being framed by relationships to a larger extent than other bioethical subfields.

Undergraduate nursing students' responses to an end-of-life educational session.

End-of-life care is an important component of healthcare students' education. The purpose of this study was to explore nursing students' perspectives of end-of-life decision-making and end-of-life care following an ethics session during the 2020-2021 academic year. A qualitative study was performed. Thirty-six undergraduate nursing students in their junior year at a private, Catholic university located in the northeast United States participated. Two nursing faculty and one bioethicist conducted an educational session on end-of-life care developed with a focus on decision-making, autonomy and dignity while employing debate pedagogy as a teaching modality. Following the session, the students were given a letter of solicitation with a link to a Qualtrics survey with four open ended questions related to end-of-life care. Four main themes, as being perceived by students, were discovered: decision-making, autonomy, the nurses' role, and the interprofessional team as important components of end-of-life care. Implications for future research include debate pedagogy as a method to teach end-of-life care and ethical decision-making as well as quantitative research or mixed methods with larger sample sizes and across health professions.

Considerations of Conscience.

The proper role of conscience in healthcare continues to be a topic of deep interest for bioethicists, healthcare professionals, and health policy experts. This issue of HEC Forum brings together a collection of articles about features of these ongoing discussions of conscience, advancing the conversations about conscience in healthcare from a variety of perspectives and on a variety of fronts. Some articles in this issue take up particularly challenging cases of conscientious objection in practice, such as Fleming, Frith, and Ramsayer's contextually rich piece on midwives in Scotland or Harter's professionally grounded analysis; others engage the changing institutional landscapes which impact considerations of conscience, such as Cummins' work on the role of employers in institutional policies about conscience and Ben Moshe's discussion of publicity and institutional committees. Pieces by Howard and Pilkington both raise conceptual considerations about how we think about the role of conscience in medicine, questioning the use of "conscientious objection" in these discussions, and Byrnes pushes back on the most influential work in this area by Mark Wicclair. The issue concludes with a piece by Wicclair, which engages each of these distinct offerings, further extending the discussions of conscience in healthcare and helpfully connecting key themes discussed by authors in this issue to his contributions and to the longer tradition of discussions of conscience in medicine. This issue challenges readers to engage different arguments from different perspectives and asks them-in some cases-to be open to revising how they think about the role of conscience and the existence of and justification for conscientious objection in the dynamic, interdisciplinary fields of healthcare.

Conscience Dissenters and Disagreement: Professions are Only as Good as Their Practitioners.

In this paper, I consider the role of conscience in medical practice. If the conscientious practice of individual practitioners cannot be defended or is incoherent or unreasonable on its own merits, then there is little reason to support conscience protection and to argue about its place in the current medical landscape. If this is the case, conscience protection should be abandoned. To the contrary, I argue that conscience protection should not be abandoned. My argument takes the form of an analysis of an essential feature of the conscience dissenter's argument, the role of disagreement within "the medical profession." Conscience dissenters make certain assumptions within their arguments about the profession, disagreements within the professions, and how such disagreement should be adjudicated. If it is the case that these assumptions are accurate reflections of the current medical landscape, then the advocate of conscience protection has one less leg to stand on. I aim to show that this is not the case and that the assumptions of the conscience dissenter are not only mistaken but are mistakes of significant magnitude, so significant as to raise serious questions about the merit of their position. If the argument in this paper is sound, then, at the very least, the conversation over conscience protection in medicine, in particular, and health care, in general, must continue.

Treating or Killing? The Divergent Moral Implications of Cardiac Device Deactivation.

In this article, I argue that there is a moral difference between deactivating an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) and turning off a cardiac pacemaker (CP). It is, at least in most cases, morally permissible to deactivate an ICD. It is not, at least in most cases, morally permissible to turn off a pacemaker in a fully or significantly pacemaker-dependent patient. After describing the relevant medical technologies-pacemakers and ICDs-I continue with contrasting perspectives on the issue of deactivation from practitioners involved with these devices: physicians, nurses, and allied professionals. Next, I offer a few possible analyses of the situation, relying on recent work in medical ethics. Considerations of intention, responsibility, and replacement support my distinguishing between ICDs and CPs. I conclude by recommending a change in policy of one of the leading cardiac societies.

Remember Evil: Remaining Assumptions In Autonomy-based Accounts Of Conscience Protection.

Discussions of the proper role of conscience and practitioner judgement within medicine have increased of late, and with good reason. The cost of allowing practitioners the space to exercise their best judgement and act according to their conscience is significant. Misuse of such protections carve out societal space in which abuse, discrimination, abandonment of patients, and simple malpractice might occur. These concerns are offered amid a backdrop of increased societal polarization and are about a profession (or set of professions) which has historically fought for such privileged space. There is a great deal that has been and might yet be said about these topics, but in this paper I aim to address one recent thread of this discussion: justification of conscience protection rooted in autonomy. In particular, I respond to an argument from Greenblum and Kasperbaur (2018) and clarify a critique I offered (2016) of an autonomy-based conscience protection argument which Greenblum and Kasperbaur seek to improve and defend. To this end, I briefly recap the central contention of that argument, briefly describe Greenblum and Kasperbaur's analysis of autonomy and of my critique, and correct what appears to be a mistake in interpretation of both my work and of autonomy-based defenses of conscience protection in general.

Dignity, Health, and Membership: Who Counts as One of Us?

This essay serves as an introduction to this issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. The five articles in this issue address a range of topics from the human embryo and substantial change to conceptions of disability. They engage claims of moral status, defense of our humanity, and argue for an accurate and just classification of persons of different communities within a healthcare system. I argue in this essay that though their concerns are diverse, the authors in this issue help to answer a common question: "Who counts as one of us?" Reading these articles through the lens of membership and the themes of dignity illustrates this commonality and bears fruit for further reflection on many of the challenging issues addressed in the subsequent papers.