Educating thoughtful and responsible leaders includes developing an awareness and ability to respond to ethical issues commonly encountered in the health care setting and facing health care administrators.
In SPHA 563 (MHA Year Two), students will examine various ethical dilemmas that emerge in the health-care setting. The course begins by looking at some ethical principles and seeing how they can help address dilemmas arising in the clinical and organizational settings. In particular, students will focus on ethical issues arising in the health care system, and how certain features of the system may contribute to or perpetuate some of these problems. This includes an exploration of how various ethical frameworks and decision-making processes can enhance accountable and responsive care, and how our own value systems, professional codes of ethics, laws, public policies, and the larger social structure all affect ethical health-care decision making.
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Instructor Profile
Alice Virani, MA (Oxon), MS, MPH, PhDClinical Ethicist, Provincial Health Services Authority of BC, Clinical Assistant Professor, Dept. of Medical Genetics, UBCPartner, Engage Associates Consulting Group. Alice Virani is a Clinical Ethicist for PHSA and based at Children’s andWomen’s Hospitals. She also serves as the Ethicist on a variety of Research Ethics Boards including the CREB, BCCA and the Children’s and Women’s REBs. Before moving into ethics, Alice was a genetic counselor in the Division of Maternal Fetal Medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. She has a masters in Human Sciences from Oxford University, a masters in Genetic Counseling from Sarah Lawrence College, a masters in Public Health from Columbia University, and a PhD in Genetics and Ethics from UBC.
In addition to her clinical activities, Alice is a clinical assistant professor in the Dept of Medical Genetics at UBC, and teaches graduate courses in Genetics and Ethics as well as the Masters in Health Administration Ethics and Ethical Decision-Making course. She also provides regular formal and less formal teaching throughout BCCH and BCWH. Her research interests relate to the many ethical issues inherent within clinical practice and research in genetic and genomic medicine and she has published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals including: Genetics inMedicine, the Journal of Genetic Counseling and Social Science and Medicine. Finally, Alice maintains an active consulting practice and has provided consulting services for clients including: the Public Health Agency of Canada, CIHR, Health Canada and Corrections Canada.