Message from the President & CEO
Welcome to the first edition of The Greenwall Foundation’s newsletter. We are very excited to share this new monthly update full of news and information from the Foundation community. In this issue, we’re spotlighting a collection of wide-ranging work by Greenwall Faculty Scholars and Alums addressing critical ethical issues in the COVID-19 pandemic, such as who should get access to a COVID-19 vaccine once available and the racial health disparities the pandemic has exposed. You’ll also find a selection of Foundation blog posts, publications, and news stories highlighting the work of Foundation leadership, Scholars, and grantees on bioethics topics such as fundraising from grateful patients, patient bias toward health care workers, and a New York Times story on medical professional organizations facing their long histories of discrimination.
We’d love to hear what you think. If you have any feedback or ideas and story suggestions for future editions, reach out to Johanna Brownell at jbrownell@greenwall.org. Enjoy!
Michelle Groman, JD
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Spotlight
Our Faculty Scholars and Alums are on the front lines caring for those affected by the novel coronavirus and working to develop policies to provide practical recommendations on ethical issues. How can we ensure that fast-moving research on new treatments and vaccines is ethically sound? Should pediatric vaccination be mandatory? How can we reconcile public health measures and civil liberties? We are curating these and other COVID-19 publications and news stories on the Foundation’s blog, adding new articles every week. Explore these timely and important pieces and bookmark our blog to stay up to date on the latest COVID-19 bioethics news.
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From Our Blog
Several members of the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program community will present their work at the 22nd Annual Conference of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH), taking place online October 12-18, 2020. You’ll find a schedule of their presentations on the Foundation’s website.
Recent Making a Difference grantees are presenting their Foundation-funded work at the upcoming ASBH conference as well. We’ve posted a schedule of their presentations on our website.
Donations from grateful former patients are an important source of funding for hospitals. In order to solicit donations, some hospitals approach wealthy patients, either directly or through physicians. Dr. Reshma Jagsi’s research, funded by The Greenwall Foundation, suggests that a large number of patients are uncomfortable with medical professionals soliciting donations from them and raises concerns about how to strike a balance between the hospital’s need to raise funds and maintaining a patient’s trust.
OB/GYNs often must make treatment recommendations for pregnant patients – including patients living with or at risk for HIV – based on insufficient evidence about how well medications will work for them. Dr. Anne Drapkin Lyerly, Greenwall Faculty Scholar Alum, Professor of Social Medicine, and board-certified OB/GYN, is working to change this. She is aiming to improve patient care by ensuring that ethical research informs treatment options for prevention and treatment of disease in pregnancy.
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Emily Largent, JD, PhD, RN | University of Pennsylvania
Greenwall Faculty Scholar
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Consent to the involvement of students, interns, and residents in the care of children has received scant attention as compared with consent for either care or research. Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, Prof. Largent says there are compelling reasons for routinely obtaining children’s assent to trainee involvement.
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Kimani Paul-Emile, JD, PhD | Fordham University School of Law
Greenwall Faculty Scholar Alum
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When patients demean clinicians on the basis of their social identity traits, such as race, ethnicity, sex, disability, gender presentation, and sexual orientation, and refuse to see these providers, what response is needed and appropriate? This Annals of Internal Medicine article co-authored by Prof. Paul-Emile offers guidance to organizations on devising effective policies that meet the needs of medical centers, patients, and health care workers across services and roles.
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Rebecca J. DeBoer, MD | University of California, San Francisco
Making a Difference Grantee
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COVID-19 has strained health care resources, forcing oncology clinicians and administrators in the United States to set priorities for cancer care. As oncology practices adapt to this new reality, expertise gained from partnerships in low-resource settings can be used for guidance. In this JAMA Oncology article, Dr. DeBoer and co-authors address priority setting in oncology and ethical guidance based on lessons learned from experience with cancer care priority setting in low-resource settings.
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“Physicians are no different from other Americans who harbor biases,” said Dr. Wailoo, whose research focuses on race and the history of medicine. “We expect doctors to speak on the basis of science, but they’re embedded in culture in the same way everyone else is.”
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Image credit: Howard University, via U.S. National Library of Medicine
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“It’s not just Covid that’s killing residents in long-term care,” said Dr. Jason Karlawish, a geriatrician at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s the isolation, the loneliness.”
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Image credit: Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
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"If companies compensate volunteers fairly for their time, it may not be ethically necessary to give them priority access," Govind Persad, a bioethicist at the University of Denver law school, said. “But I think it could be reasonable to do that, and the exact form that takes would depend on a lot on what the epidemiology looks like,” he said.
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Image credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Bloomberg
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COVID-19 “sucked up a lot of the health care space,” said UNC’s health politics expert, Jonathan Oberlander. “And protests in cities and the police have sucked up a lot of the remaining oxygen, so there’s not much room left.”
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Image credit: youtube.com/calcunningham
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Coming Up
William C. Stubing Memorial Lecture | November 16, 2020 6:30 pm ET
Whose Pain Matters? Reflections on Race, Social Justice, and COVID-19's Revealed Inequalities: a live webinar with Keith Wailoo, PhD, Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs, Princeton University. Register here.
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