MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics

Last updated
MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics
Type Clinical medical ethics research and training institute
Headquarters University of Chicago
Location
Director
Mark Siegler [1]
Key people
Peter Angelos [2]
Marshall Chin [3]
Lainie Friedman Ross [4]
Daniel Sulmasy [5]

The MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, founded in 1981, is a non-profit clinical medical ethics research institute based in the United States. Founded by its director, Mark Siegler, the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics aims to improve patient care and outcomes by promoting research in clinical medical ethics by educating physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals and by helping University of Chicago Medicine patients, families, and health care providers identify and resolve ethical dilemmas. The center has trained over 410 fellows, including many physicians, attorneys, PhDs and bioethicists.

Contents

History

In 1983, with support from Dorothy J. MacLean and the MacLean family, the University of Chicago established the nation's first program devoted to clinical medical ethics. Dr. Mark Siegler was appointed its founding director. The MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics was pivotal in establishing and expanding the field of clinical medical ethics. It did this through its pioneering program in ethics fellowship training; its foundational role in ethics consultation; its close involvement in research and the protection of human subjects through an innovative concept of "research ethics consultation;" and by encouraging scholarly research and publication in clinical medical ethics. The center also encouraged the "empirical turn" in bioethics scholarship, an approach that uses clinical epidemiology, health services research, and decision science techniques to study ethical matters in clinical practice. The center's current and former faculty and fellows have published more than 210 books on topics related to medicine and medical ethics. [6]

Fellowship

Mark Siegler at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics Mark Siegler at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.jpg
Mark Siegler at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics

The MacLean for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago offers the oldest, largest, and most successful clinical ethics fellowship in the world. [7] Dr. Mark Siegler, the Founding Director of the MacLean Center, created the first clinical ethics fellowship in the nation in 1981. [7] Since then, the MacLean Center faculty members have trained more than 320 fellows, many of whom have gone on to direct their own ethics programs. [7] While most fellows are physicians, the center welcomes those interested in medical ethics from any perspective, including philosophy, theology, nursing, law, and the social sciences. The MacLean Center, with more than 45 faculty members from many disciplines, provides training in clinical medical ethics and specialized fellowships in surgical ethics and pediatric ethics. Prior to 2014, through a partnership with the United States Veterans Administration (VA) hospital system, two or three VA medical professionals per year are selected by the VA through a national search to participate in the MacLean Center ethics fellowship training program.[ citation needed ]

Consultation

Since 1981, The MacLean Center has offered clinical ethics consultations to assist patients, families, physicians, nurses, and students. MacLean Center fellows and faculty wrote many of the early papers guiding the field of clinical ethics consultation. The Center developed the concept of "research ethics consultation" in 1987 and has continued to offer this service to translational researchers and to the IRB.[ citation needed ]

Research

MacLean Center research has been on the cutting edge of both medicine and ethics, with clinical research proceeding in tandem with medical advances. The MacLean Center was involved in the introduction of pediatric live-donor liver transplantation in 1989. [8] This new procedure raised complex ethical questions about medical innovation, risk/benefit balancing, informed consent, and the protection of "living organ donors". The MacLean Center worked for two years with transplant experts at the University of Chicago to review the ethical issues, publish protocols, and encourage professional discussion of the procedure before it was first performed on a patient. The MacLean Center's transplant work is one example of the wide range of ethics-related research projects undertaken by its faculty. The MacLean Center faculty publishes on subjects such as research ethics, health policy, health disparities, end of life care, surgical ethics, pediatric outcomes, genetics, and transplantation ethics. Current and former MacLean Center faculty and fellows have published more than 150 books in the field of medical ethics. [8]

Events

For over 30 years, the MacLean Center has directed and sponsored programs form faculty and students at the University of Chicago. Since 1984, The Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminar Series has organized weekly meetings throughout the academic year to provide a sustainable interdisciplinary forum on issues in medicine and medical ethics. Additionally, every November, the MacLean Center hosts the Dorothy J. MacLean Fellows Conference, which draws speakers and audiences from a wide range of disciplines.

Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminar Series

In 1981, under the auspices of the MacLean Center, Mark Siegler and Richard Epstein organized a yearlong interdisciplinary seminar series on Bad Outcomes after Medical Intervention. The success of that initial seminar program demonstrated that there was great interest at the University of Chicago in creating a sustainable interdisciplinary forum to discuss health-related subjects with colleagues from across campus. Since 1981, the MacLean Center has sponsored an annual seminar series that has examined the ethical aspects of one key health related issue each year. Previous topics have included: Organ Transplantation, Pediatric Ethics, End-of-Life Care, Global Health, Health Care Disparities, Medical Professionalism, Confidentiality, and Pharmaceutical Innovation and Regulation.

Annual Dorothy J. MacLean Fellows Conference

Each year for the past 28 years, the MacLean Center has hosted a conference that draws speakers, primarily former fellows of the MacLean Center, who discuss today's issues in clinical medical ethics. The conference audience usually numbers 250 to 300 and includes more than 100 former faculty and fellows. The conference remembers Dorothy Jean MacLean, who helped create the MacLean Center and was deeply committed to its work. D.J. MacLean believed that education was the best way to improve the world and throughout her life supported many leading educational institutions.[ citation needed ]

The 28th consecutive MacLean Fellows Conference will be held on November 11–12, 2016. More than 35 former fellows will be giving presentations.[ citation needed ]

Resources

Library

The MacLean Center Library, started by generous donations from Drs. Edmund Pellegrino, Leon Kass, and James J. Smith, as well as by Dr. Sulmasy and Dr. Siegler, exists as a non-lending resource for faculty, fellows, and students working in the field of clinical medical ethics. The library currently houses an interdisciplinary collection of over five-thousand books and visual media. The library subscribes to twenty-five journals related to medicine and ethics, and presently maintains complete collections from Volume 1 of many of the core journals in medical ethics including the "Hastings Center Report", Journal of Clinical Ethics, "Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics", "Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal", "Journal of Medicine and Philosophy", ""National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly"", and "Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics". The library recently received an additional donation of over 1,300 books from the personal libraries of Drs. Edmund Pellegrino and Professor Alan J. Wiesbard. The library is currently working to digitize and catalog its collection of over 400 videos related to medical ethics that date back to the 1980. Library staff anticipates making this collection available to faculty and students online by the end of the 2014 academic year integrating its catalogue with the University of Chicago central catalogue.

Awards and honors

Cornerstone Award

The MacLean Center received the Cornerstone Award on October 25, 2013 from the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities for "outstanding contributions from an institution that has helped shape the direction of the fields of bioethics and/or medical humanities." The MacLean Center joined the three other institutions that have received this award in the past: the Hastings Center, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and the Institute for Medical Humanities at Galveston, Texas.

The MacLean Center Prize

The MacLean Center Prize in Clinical Ethics and Health Outcomes celebrates individuals who have made transformative contributions to the field of clinical ethics through scholarship, practice, leadership, and policy development. The MacLean Center Prize of $50,000 is the largest prize in Clinical Ethics. The first recipient of the MacLean Center Prize was Dr. John Wennberg, the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor Emeritus for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School. [9] The most recent recipient of the MacLean Center Prize, recognized in November 2012, is " Dr. Peter Singer ". A former MacLean Center Fellow, Dr. Singer has dedicated much of his career to the ethics of global health. [9]

Related Research Articles

Bioethics is both a field of study and professional practice, interested in ethical issues related to health, including those emerging from advances in biology, medicine, and technologies. It proposes the discussion about moral discernment in society and it is often related to medical policy and practice, but also to broader questions as environment, well-being and public health. Bioethics is concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, theology and philosophy. It includes the study of values relating to primary care, other branches of medicine, ethical education in science, animal, and environmental ethics, and public health.

Joseph J. Fins, M.D., D. Hum. Litt., M.A.C.P., F.R.C.P. is an American physician and medical ethicist. He is chief of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College, where he serves as The E. William Davis Jr., M.D. Professor of Medical Ethics, and Professor of Medicine, Professor of Public Health, and Professor of Medicine in Psychiatry. Fins is also Director of Medical Ethics and an attending physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. Fins is also a member of the adjunct faculty of Rockefeller University and has served as Associate for Medicine at The Hastings Center. He is the Solomon Center Distinguished Scholar in Medicine, Bioethics and the Law and a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton to The White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy and currently serves on The New York State Task Force on Life and the Law by gubernatorial appointment.

The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, is an interdisciplinary center drawing upon expertise from across the breadth of Johns Hopkins University and Health System. Its mission is to conduct advanced scholarship on the ethics of clinical practice, biomedical science, and public health, both locally and globally, and to engage students, trainees, the public, and policymakers in serious discourse about these issues.

Albert R. Jonsen was one of the founders of the field of Bioethics. He was Emeritus Professor of Ethics in Medicine at the University of Washington, School of Medicine, where he was Chairman of the Department of Medical History and Ethics from 1987 to 1999. After retiring from UW, he returned to San Francisco, where he co-founded the Program in Medicine and Human Values at Sutter Health's California Pacific Medical Center in 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dan Wikler</span> American philosopher

Daniel Isaac Wikler is an American public health educator, philosopher, and medical ethicist. He is currently the Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. He is Director and a core faculty member in the Harvard Program in Ethics and Health (PEH). His current research interests are ethical issues in population and international health, including the allocation of health resources, health research involving human subjects, organ transplant ethics, and ethical dilemmas arising in public health practice, and he teaches several courses each year. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.

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Michael Alan Grodin is Professor of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health, where he has received the distinguished Faculty Career Award for Research and Scholarship, and 20 teaching awards, including the "Norman A. Scotch Award for Excellence in Teaching." He is also Professor of Family Medicine and Psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine. In addition, Dr. Grodin is the Director of the Project on Medicine and the Holocaust at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, and a member of the faculty of the Division of Religious and Theological Studies. He has been on the faculty at Boston University for 35 years. He completed his B.S. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his M.D. degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his postdoctoral and fellowship training at UCLA and Harvard University.

The University of Tennessee College of Medicine is one of six graduate schools of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) in downtown Memphis. The oldest public medical school in Tennessee, the UT College of Medicine is a LCME-accredited member of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and awards graduates of the four-year program Doctor of Medicine (MD) degrees. The college's primary focus is to provide practicing health professionals for the state of Tennessee.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Siegler</span> American physician

Mark Siegler is an American physician who specializes in internal medicine. He is the Lindy Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Chicago., He is the Founding Director of Chicago's MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Siegler has practiced and taught internal medicine at the University of Chicago for more than 50 years.

Daniel Sulmasy is an American medical ethicist and former Franciscan friar. He has been Acting Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and on the faculty of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioetics was also named He is the inaugural Andre Hellegers Professor of Biomedical Ethics, with co-appointments in the Departments of Philosophy and Medicine at Georgetown.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mildred Z. Solomon</span> American bioethics researcher

Mildred Z. Solomon is an American bioethics researcher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lainie Friedman Ross</span> American physician and bioethicist

Lainie Friedman Ross is an American physician and bioethicist who works at the University of Chicago.

David T. Rubin is an American gastroenterologist and educator. He is the Joseph B. Kirsner Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago, where he is also the Chief of the Section of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition. He also serves as the Co-Director of the Digestive Diseases Center.

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Christine I. Mitchell is an American filmmaker and bioethicist and until her retirement in September 2022, the executive director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School (HMS).

James Michael Millis is an American academic and surgeon specializing in pediatric and adult liver transplantation. He is Professor of Surgery and Vice Chair of Global Surgery at University of Chicago. He is also the director of Clinical Leadership Development Fellowship and Hepatobiliary Surgery at the University of Chicago Medical Center. He is known for developing new techniques of liver surgery that improved outcomes following liver transplantation and non transplant liver and biliary tract surgery.

Marshall Chin is an American physician who is the Richard Parrillo Family Professor of Healthcare Ethics at the University of Chicago. He is also the Associate Director of the University of Chicago's MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and Senior Faculty Scholar at the Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence.

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This article is about the Nir Eyal (bioethicist). For the author, see Nir Eyal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marion Danis</span> American physician

Marion Danis is an American bioethicist and physician-scientist. She is head of the section on ethics and health policy and chief of the bioethics consultation service at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center.

Tara Olive Henderson is an American pediatric oncologist. As the Arthur and Marian Edelstein Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, she is also the Director of the Childhood Cancer Survivor Center, Director of Survivorship at the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center, and chief of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at the University of Chicago.

References

  1. "Mark Siegler, M.D." The MacLean Center. Retrieved 2014-02-13.
  2. "Peter Angelos, M.D., Ph.D." The MacLean Center. 2014-02-14. Retrieved 2014-02-13.
  3. "Marshall Chin, M.D., M.P.H." The MacLean Center. 2014-02-13. Retrieved 2014-02-13.
  4. "Lainie Ross, M.D., Ph.D." The MacLean Center. 2014-03-13. Retrieved 2014-02-13.
  5. "Daniel Sulmasy, M.D., Ph.D." The MacLean Center. 2014-03-13. Retrieved 2014-02-13.
  6. "About Us | The MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics". Macleanethics.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 2014-02-25.
  7. 1 2 3 "Fellowship | The MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics". Macleanethics.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 2014-02-25.
  8. 1 2 "Research | The MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics". Macleanethics.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 2014-02-25.
  9. 1 2 "Awards and Honors | The MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics". Macleanethics.uchicago.edu. 2013-10-25. Retrieved 2014-02-25.