Healthcare Conferences UK in association with Christopher Fincken, Independent Member & Former Chair of the UK Caldicott Guardian Council, are pleased to present this National Caldicott Guardian Conference which focuses on the Caldicott Guardian and Ethical Decision Making – with particular emphasis justifiable, ethical and practical decision making.
EXTENDED SESSION: Ethical Decision Making: Principles and Practice
Dr Giles Birchley
Research Fellow, Centre for Ethics in Medicine
University of Bristol
• ethical principles and frameworks to support moral decision making
• making difficult decisions: understanding conflicting ethical principles
• integrating clinical ethics into clinical decision making
• advice for Caldicott Guardians
Dr Giles Birchley discusses Ethical decision-making: principles and practice. What is ethics in practice, and can we be experts at ethical decision-making?
Ethics or ‘moral philosophy’ is the study of good (and bad), right (and wrong). The presentation points out the ‘upside’ of ethics – such as:
- Ethics can encourage new ways of looking at a problem, making us aware of values we might otherwise take for granted
- Ethics can offer language that helps describe the intuitions we feel about situations to others
- Ethical frameworks can be heuristics to help us through crises
- Ethics can help us to make sense of an apparently senseless world
The ‘downside’ of ethics, such as:
- Ethics are “aporetic” – often the ‘good’ is in doubt or contradicts other goods
- Ethics is not a science and cannot tell us how to definitively deal with these contradictions
Dr Birchley discusses in more detail Immanuel Kant's ideology, the idea that moral understanding is based on free-will. The way we knew what was ethical is the feeling of duty, our expertise is in identifying our duty- we are experts in what we should do, not what other people should do. This is a radically individualistic sense of being an ethics expert.
The presentation goes on to discuss in detail and explore other ideas of ethical decision making principles and in practice, ethical expertise and morality.
EXTENDED SESSION: Information Sharing & the Duty of Candour
Mike O’Connell
Legal Services Practitioner and Interim Senior Inquests Manager
Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust
• the legal principles behind the Duty of Candour: when should disclosures be made?
• information sharing and the Duty of Candour
• training and supporting staff in disclosing unanticipated events in patient care
• liaising with patients and families
• applying ‘being open’ principles
• examples in practice
EXTENDED INTERACTIVE SESSION: Caldicott Decision Making in Practice; Working through Caldicott Case Examples
Christopher Fincken
Former Chair
UK Caldicott Guardian Council
This extended session will work through Case Histories in practice– using real case study examples to demonstrate the complexities of Caldicott decision making and tools and techniques to help you in practice. The session will include case studies on Covid-19 domestic violence and sharing of information.
The session will include small breakout groups
