Events

Asian Paediatric Ethics Network (APEN) of the Paediatric Ethics Programme at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics will be conducting a Webinar on ‘Promoting health in the sexually active teenager – An ethical perspective’.

By Invitation only

The dates and topics for each unit are as follows:

3 May 2024: Unit 3 – Elements of decision-making (Part 2): shared decision-making, end of life decision-making, advance care planning and non-beneficial treatment

10 May 2024: Unit 4 – Health law, defensive medicine and therapeutic innovations

By invitation only.

The dates and topics for each unit are as follows:

19 April 2024: Unit 1 – Ethical reasoning, ethical guidance & relationship with professionals

26 April 2024: Unit 2 – Elements of decision-making (Part 1): autonomy, informed consent, truth telling, decision-making capacity and best interests

No registration required.

Talk by Professor Peter Singer

Speaker’s Biography

Peter Singer has been bestowed the tag of “world’s most influential living philosopher” by journalists. He was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. After teaching in England, the United States and Australia, he has, since 1999, been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He first became well-known internationally after the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975. Some of his other well-known books are: Practical Ethics, The Expanding Circle, How Are We to Live?, Rethinking Life and Death, Pushing Time Away, The Life You Can Save, The Point of View of the Universe (co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek), Ethics in the Real World, and Why Vegan?

Talk by Professor Peter Singer

Speaker’s Biography

Peter Singer has been bestowed the tag of “world’s most influential living philosopher” by journalists. He was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. After teaching in England, the United States and Australia, he has, since 1999, been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He first became well-known internationally after the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975. Some of his other well-known books are: Practical Ethics, The Expanding Circle, How Are We to Live?, Rethinking Life and Death, Pushing Time Away, The Life You Can Save, The Point of View of the Universe (co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek), Ethics in the Real World, and Why Vegan?

Physical Location:
NUS Business School, BIZ1 #02-04

Or, sign up here to attend via Zoom: https://bit.ly/NUSprosoc

Challenge studies are research studies where human volunteers are intentionally exposed to infectious diseases such as influenza, malaria or dengue. Such studies have received more attention in recent years with their application to COVID-19 during and after the pandemic. This workshop aims to explore the ethical aspects of challenge studies generally as well as through a Singaporean and COVID-19 lens.

Distinguished speakers ranging from clinicians, bioethicists and participant representatives will share their varied insights on challenge studies. The first half of the workshop will feature the history and ethical aspects of challenge studies and the second half will zoom in on how challenge studies (particularly for COVID-19) may be conducted in Singapore and the relevant ethical considerations. Both sessions will include an interactive and engaging Q&A segment where participants may pose questions to the speakers.

Who should attend: Clinician-scientists, IRB members/secretariat, those involved in governance/oversight of research, academics, policymakers

Seminar by Professor Jonathan Moreno

Synopsis : The field that came to be known as bioethics in the late 1960’s is an integral part of the liberal international order intentionally developed in the aftermath of the catastrophe of World War II.  Following the Russian war in Ukraine there is every reason to believe that the set of norms and institutions that preserved peace in Europe through the first Cold War will be revised according to new assumptions that will structure international relations in a second Cold War. Bioethics will need to adapt to the conditions of the new Cold War, as it was shaped by the conditions of the last.

CENTRES Clinical Ethics Conference 2024 is on the theme “Revisiting Best Interests” and will be held on 11^th January 2024 & 12th January 2024 at the Kent Ridge Guild House.

About

The CENTRES Clinical Ethics Conference 2024 will focus on enhancing clarity on the principle of best interests. Although this complex topic has garnered significant attention in bioethics and legal literature, uncertainties persist when applying the principle in clinical practice. It is not always clear what ‘best interests’ is, leading to misinterpretations and conflicts in the care process. 

The goal is to enable healthcare professionals to better understand what best interests mean in various contexts – patient welfare, beneficence, capacity, mental illness. The broad nature of best interests offers us the flexibility to select nuanced issues and cases for discussion. 

Who should attend: Clinical Ethics Committee (CEC) chairpersons and members, doctors, nurses, medical social workers, allied health professionals, lawyers, academics, care workers and policy makers.

Continuing Professional Education Points: Will be awarded for doctors, pharmacists and nurses.

This conference is fully subscribed.

The first Asian Paediatric Ethics Conference is on the theme “Emerging Issues in Paediatric Ethics” and will be held on 2^nd  & 3^rd  October 2023 at the Kent Ridge Guild House.

The practice of clinical paediatrics brings with it unique and distinct ethical issues and dilemmas, particularly in today’s fast advancing world. And yet, the field of paediatric ethics lags behind its adult counterpart, particularly in the Asian region. The Centre for Biomedical Ethics in the National University of Singapore hopes to address this gap by organising an Asian Paediatric Ethics Conference as a platform to discuss, reflect and share practices among practitioners and scholars in our region and further aims to raise the profile of paediatric ethics to better care for children,  who represent the future of our society.

Who should attend
Academics, Healthcare professionals and medical  undergraduates.

Continuing Professional Education Points
The award of CME/CPE points for this event is subject to approval by the respective professional board

Registration
Begins in July. There will be a Registration fee.

RSVP to aruna_c@nus.edu.sg

Pandemic Ethics: 5 Lessons

There is wide recognition that responsible human subjects research requires careful consideration of a number of ethical issues, including balancing risks and benefits, avoiding exploitation, and promoting scientifically valuable research. IRBs are designed to assess these and other issues before research is conducted. However, like all governance systems, IRB review and other oversight mechanisms do not always conform to the ideals. IRBs can sometimes be too lenient, allowing research to go through that is ethically problematic; or, IRBs can be too strict, imposing requirements and delaying research conduct without good justification.

This webinar series consists of four sessions and will explore, through a deep-dive into four specific topics in research ethics, how IRBs and the research enterprise can best achieve this balance. The series will consist of talks by experts at the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Biomedical Ethics, followed by an open Q&A for participants to broaden the discussion.

Session 1, 16 Aug 2023 : What Counts as Research? (registration opens now)
Session 2, 30 Aug 2023 : Risks in Research
Session 3, 13 Sep 2023 : Assessing Scientific Validity
Session 4, 27 Sep 2023 : Coercion, Incentives and Inducement

Time: 12pm to 1pm

Talks presented by:

Regulating Technologies: Obstacles and Opportunities by Professor Henry T. (Hank) Greely

Why, When, and How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence by Professor Simon Chesterman

Rapidly Advancing Stem Cell Technologies: Regulations vs. Guidelines by Dr Insoo Hyun

This workshop is by invitation only

The Paediatric Ethics Programme at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics is conducting a Workshop on Parental Discretion and Conflict in Intensive Care on Saturday 6^th May from 2.30 to 6.00 pm.

Workshop will be led by Professor Dominic Wilkinson, Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Oxford, and Director of Medical Ethics and Deputy Director at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He is a consultant in newborn intensive care at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. Prof Wilkinson is also a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics.

Date: 11 Apr to 18 May 2023
Days: Tuesdays & Thursdays
Time: 4.30pm to 6.30pm

The Certificate in Healthcare Ethics and Law is a training course that focuses on select core topics in clinical ethics, catering to advanced learning needs. This course is specifically intended for Chairpersons and/or Deputy Chairpersons of Clinical Ethics Committees. Some of the topics explored during the course include ethical reasoning and analysis, innovative treatments, shared decision-making, mental capacity, end-of-life issues, medical negligence, confidentiality, etc.

Seminars (currently virtual) will comprise of lectures and discussions on recent developments and cases (anonymised) involving complex ethical issues.

This course is by invitation only.

Participants who complete this course will receive a Certificate of Completion. 

REGISTRATION IS FULL 

CENTRES Annual Clinical Ethics Conference 2023 is on the theme “Ethical Challenges in Home & Community Care Settings” and will be held on 6^th & 7^th February at the Kent Ridge Guild House.

Abstract

Continuing to live in their community is fundamental for the old to thrive despite frailty and illness. Care at home – the most common care setting for most people throughout life – is crucial to care systems in ageing societies. Home care systems rely on health and social care services and informal caregiving in the home where goals and standards of care are hard to pin down. This conference will focus on national policies, highlighting ethical issues and exploring ethical frameworks to enable participants to analyse and reflect upon ethical dilemmas that arise in practice on the ground.

Who should attend: Doctors, nurses, medical social workers, allied health professionals, academics, care workers, policy makers, older persons, individuals caring for someone at home or in a community care setting (befrienders, caregivers).

Continuing Professional Education Points: Will be awarded for doctors, pharmacists and nurses.

Registration: There is no fee to attend the conference because it is fully supported by MOH. Registration will open at the end of October. Seats are limited – register soon!

The dates and topics for each unit are as follows:

13 Jan 2023: Unit 3 – Elements of decision-making (Part 2): shared decision-making, end of life decision-making, advance care planning and non-beneficial treatment

27 Jan 2023: Unit 4 – Health law, defensive medicine and therapeutic innovations

Abstract:

The experience of COVID has helped clarify how to allocate scarce medical resources “fairly and equitably” both within and among countries.  The ethical allocation of scarce medical resources entails a three-step process: 1) elucidating the fundamental ethical values for allocation, 2) using the values to delineate priority tiers for scarce resources, and 3) actually implementing the prioritization to faithfully realize the fundamental values.   Myriad reports and assessments have elucidated five core, substantive values for ethical allocation: 1) maximizing benefits and minimizing harms; 2) mitigating unfair disadvantage; 3) equal moral concern; 4) reciprocity; and 5) instrumental value.  Importantly, these values are universal, none of the values is sufficient alone, and their relative weight and application will vary by context.  In addition, there are procedural principles such as transparency, engagement, and evidence- responsiveness.   Prioritizing the values of minimizing harms and instrumental value led to widespread agreement on priority tiers to include health care workers, first responders, people at high risk of death such as the elderly, those with comorbid conditions, and those living in congregate housing.   COVID also revealed problems with the  implementation of these values and priority tiers such as allocating vaccine based on population rather than COVID burden and passive allocation that exacerbated disparities by requiring recipients to spend time signing up for and travelling to appointments.   This ethical framework should be the starting point for allocation of scarce medical resources in future pandemics and other public health conditions.  For instance, the allocation of the new malaria vaccine among sub-Saharan African countries should be based not on reciprocity to countries that participated in research but on maximally reducing serious illness and deaths, especially among infants and children.

The dates and topics for each unit are as follows:

9 Dec 2022: Unit 1 – Ethical reasoning, ethical guidance & relationship with professionals

16 Dec 2022: Unit 2 – Elements of decision-making (Part 1): autonomy, informed consent, truth telling, decision-making capacity and best interests

Educators
This seminar series on Healthcare Ethics & Law is led by Dr Sumytra Menon & Assoc. Prof Lee See Muah

Learning objective
To understand some of the ethical and legal issues that arise in caring for transgender patients and foreign worker patients.
 
Target audience
Healthcare professionals with a good understanding of the basics of caring for vulnerable patients.

Educators
This seminar series on Healthcare Ethics & Law is led by Dr Sumytra Menon & Assoc. Prof Lee See Muah

Learning objective
To understand the roles of the healthcare professional, family and patient in shared decision-making and the ethical and legal issues that may arise from these interactions.

Speaker: A/P Angela Ballantyne

Abstract

During the height of the covid pandemic’s first wave, there was significant global debate about how to ethically allocate scarce healthcare resources such as access to ventilators and ICU beds. A tension emerged between the ethical values of utility (maximising aggerate welfare, e.g. by saving the most lives) and equity (preventing avoidable differences between socio-demographic groups). Triage policies that aimed to save the most lives would deprioritize those with worse underlying health status, and this risked entrenching racial and social injustice. In this talk I explore efforts to balance the tension between utility and equity in the ICU. I also consider the special nature of ICU as a burdensome treatment, and how trade-offs between utility and equity can be managed in relation to low risk interventions such as vaccines.   

Sustainability, currently, plays virtually no role in bioethics. This seems surprising, given the common definition of ‘bioethics’ as involving discussion of the ethical issues relating to life. There are a number of possible reasons for this neglect. First, it, perhaps, reflects the historical dominance of clinical ethics in thinking about bioethics, and therefore certain influential values (most obviously, autonomy). Second, ‘sustainability’ is, arguably, a vague concept and its relevance to bioethics is obscure. Third, if we take sustainability seriously, it potentially has transformative implications for bioethics that some may seem as too burdensome.

In this talk, by considering a range of examples such as antimicrobial resistance, healthcare systems and climate change, I seek to clarify and articulate an account of sustainability that is relevant to bioethics. My argument is that once sustainability is clarified as a concept, it can be seen to imply a set of obligations related to the use of resources.

NUS Centre for Biomedical Ethics (CBmE) is delighted to launch its inaugural Seminar Series. Our aim is to offer continuing professional education (CET) programmes for healthcare professionals and other professionals with an interest in biomedical ethics. The topic for this seminar series is Ageing & Ethics. 

Ageing and ageing societies reframe many questions in contemporary bioethics.  These seminars will explore questions on:

• How to deal with living longer
• Relationships and loneliness in old age
• Needing and arranging care as one ages
• Dementia and advance care planning

Date: 5 May to 14 June 2022
Days: Tuesdays & Thursdays
Time: 4.00pm to 6.00pm

The Certificate of Healthcare Ethics & Law (CHEL) is a course oriented for practice and focused on developing participants’ skills to use ethics to solve ethical dilemmas faced in clinical practice.

This is a blended course with videos and readings posted online and 12 two hour synchronous workshops offered by the CENTRES programme at CBmE. 

This inaugural run of CHEL is by invitation-only and tailored for the Chairpersons and Deputy Chairpersons of Clinical Ethics Committees.

The topics covered include ethical reasoning and analysis, innovative treatments, telemedicine, shared decision-making, mental capacity, end of life, vulnerable adults and children at risk, medical negligence and confidentiality. 

Participants who complete this course will receive a Certificate of Completion. 

NUS Centre for Biomedical Ethics (CBmE) is delighted to launch its inaugural Seminar Series. Our aim is to offer continuing professional education (CET) programmes for healthcare professionals and other professionals with an interest in biomedical ethics. The topic for this seminar series is Ageing & Ethics. 

Ageing and ageing societies reframe many questions in contemporary bioethics.  These seminars will explore questions on:

• How to deal with living longer
• Relationships and loneliness in old age
• Needing and arranging care as one ages
• Dementia and advance care planning

NUS Centre for Biomedical Ethics (CBmE) is delighted to launch its inaugural Seminar Series. Our aim is to offer continuing professional education (CET) programmes for healthcare professionals and other professionals with an interest in biomedical ethics. The topic for this seminar series is Ageing & Ethics. 

Ageing and ageing societies reframe many questions in contemporary bioethics.  These seminars will explore questions on:

• How to deal with living longer
• Relationships and loneliness in old age
• Needing and arranging care as one ages
• Dementia and advance care planning

CENTRES annual Clinical Ethics Conference is on the theme “New Medical Disclosure & Advice Requirements: Implications for Healthcare Professionals” and will be held on 23rd and 24th March 2022 via Zoom.

Many healthcare professionals may still have unanswered questions on the impact of the new section 37 of the Civil Law Act, which codifies the standard of information disclosure and advice, so the aim of this conference is to facilitate participants’ understanding of the effect the new law has on actual practice. Participants will gain an enhanced understanding of the law and continue practising in the best interests of patients.

Who should attend: Healthcare professionals, academics, policymakers, and those with an interest in the practical aspects of the new law.

Continuing Professional Education Points: Will be awarded for doctors, pharmacists and nurses.

Registration is free: Open now! 

A/Prof Michael Dunn 

Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore