Aim: Midwives are expected to identify and help resolve ethics problems that arise in practice, skills that are presumed to be taught in midwifery educational programs. In this study, we explore how midwives recognize ethical dilemmas in clinical practice and examine the sources of their ethics education. Methods: We conducted semi-structured, individual interviews with midwives from throughout the United States (U.S.) (n = 15). Transcripts of the interviews were analysed using an iterative process to identify themes and subthemes. Findings: Midwives described a range of professional ethical dilemmas, including challenges related to negotiating strained interprofessional relationships and protecting or promoting autonomy for women. Ethical dilemmas were identified by the theme of unease, a sense of distress that was expressed in three subthemes: uncertainty of action, compromise in action, and reflecting on action. Learning about ethics and ethical dilemmas occurred, for the most part, outside of the classroom, with the majority of participants reporting that their midwifery program did not confer the skills to identify and resolve ethical challenges. Conclusion: Midwives in this study reported a range of ethical challenges and minimal classroom education related to ethics. Midwifery educators should consider the purposeful and explicit inclusion of midwifery-specific ethics content in their curricula and in interprofessional ethics education. Reflection and self-awareness of bias were identified as key components of understanding ethical frameworks. As clinical preceptors were identified as a key source of ethics learning, midwifery educators should consider ways to support preceptors in building their skills as role models and ethics educators.
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Abstract Background: Healthcare professionals encounter ethical dilemmas and concerns in their practice. More research is needed to understand these ethical problems and to know how to educate professionals to respond to them. Research objective: To describe ethical dilemmas and concerns at work from the perspectives of Finnish and Dutch healthcare professionals studying at the master’s level. Research design: Exploratory, qualitative study that used the text of student online discussions of ethical dilemmas at work as data. Method: Participants’ online discussions were analyzed using inductive content analysis. Participants: The sample consisted of 49 students at master’s level enrolled in professional ethics courses at universities in Finland and the Netherlands. Ethical considerations: Permission for conducting the study was granted from both universities of applied sciences. All students provided their informed consent for the use of their assignments as research data. Findings: Participants described 51 problematic work situations. Among these, 16 were found to be ethical dilemmas, and the remaining were work issues with an ethical concern and did not meet criteria of a dilemma. The most common problems resulted from concerns about quality care, safety of healthcare professionals, patients’ rights, and working with too few staff and inadequate resources. Discussion: The results indicated that participants were concerned about providing quality of care and raised numerous questions about how to provide it in challenging situations. The results show that it was difficult for students to differentiate ethical dilemmas from other ethical work concerns. Conclusion: Online discussions among healthcare providers give them an opportunity to relate ethical principles to real ethical dilemmas and problems in their work as well as to critically analyze ethical issues. We found that discussions with descriptions of ethical dilemmas and concerns by health professionals provide important information and recommendations not only for education and practice but also for health policy.
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This thesis is about dilemmas, discretionary space and ethics in public welfare. In my position as a lecturer of ethics in socio-legal practices I am concerned with the way in which these practices open up to an ethical development of their professionals. Thus, this thesis is a search for the most fundamental themes and issues in understanding and judging public welfare as a, perhaps, ethical socio-legal practice. In the field of public services professionals function as the intermediary between government and citizen. In their daily work public welfare professionals take care of the important societal task and goal of poverty alleviation. During the last decades, public welfare has developed into a civil right that involves many obligations on the part of the client in return. The requirement to see to it that the client fulfils these obligations has complicated the public welfare professional’s task of helping citizens in need.
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Sowijs deed onderzoek naar verschillende strategieën voor burgerparticipatie via sociale media. Hoe moet je Twitteren om mensen te betrekken en gebruik je dan wel of geen hashtags. Lees het in dit whitepaper!
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Whitepaper: The use of AI is on the rise in the financial sector. Utilizing machine learning algorithms to make decisions and predictions based on the available data can be highly valuable. AI offers benefits to both financial service providers and its customers by improving service and reducing costs. Examples of AI use cases in the financial sector are: identity verification in client onboarding, transaction data analysis, fraud detection in claims management, anti-money laundering monitoring, price differentiation in car insurance, automated analysis of legal documents, and the processing of loan applications.
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As a practitioner, a manager and a scientist in social work for 40 years, I am still intrigued by the social work positioning and legitimating processes. Its recognition by users and financiers is often diffuse and its fragmentation sometimes hinders effective interventions. In social work itself, we see a range of positioning processes, most of them either legitimating social work as a promoter of social justice, a supporter of emancipation and anti-oppressive practice, or positioning social work as a therapeutic approach, treating people with socio-psychological and psychiatric disorders. Social work is often promoted as a ‘real’ profession, in need of formal recognition and in need of a precise profile. In this article it will be argued that the core of social work is about supporting people in their social functioning and should position itself in the centre of the post-modern quest: the social-psychological disorientation, the lack of meaning, and the problems of isolation and exclusion. Modern professionalism is not about demarcating and regulating but much more about ‘Entgrenzung’ and openness.
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Orthopedagogen Sarah Torenstra-Brinkers en Sofie Sergeant gaan in gesprek met leerlingen en ouders, en voeren een voorzichtige verkenning rondom het dilemma: leiden we ‘hoogbegaafde kinderen’ het beste op in settings waar diversiteit troef is, of juist in aparte settings? De term ‘hoogbegaafdheid’ wordt onder de loep genomen, alsook het waarom van het label. Vervolgens staan de auteurs – samen met diverse stakeholders – stil bij wat de leerlingen nodig versus te bieden hebben. Tot slot wordt er samen nagedacht over: wat kan ons huidig onderwijs leren van het onderwijs aan kinderen die hoogbegaafd worden genoemd? En, wat zou de rol van orthopedagogen kunnen zijn in dit proces?
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Many have suggested that AI-based interventions could enhance learning by personalization, improving teacher effectiveness, or by optimizing educational processes. However, they could also have unintended or unexpected side-effects, such as undermining learning by enabling procrastination, or reducing social interaction by individualizing learning processes. Responsible scientific experiments are required to map both the potential benefits and the side-effects. Current procedures used to screen experiments by research ethics committees do not take the specific risks and dilemmas that AI poses into account. Previous studies identified sixteen conditions that can be used to judge whether trials with experimental technology are responsible. These conditions, however, were not yet translated into practical procedures, nor do they distinguish between the different types of AI applications and risk categories. This paper explores how those conditions could be further specified into procedures that could help facilitate and organize responsible experiments with AI, while differentiating for the different types of AI applications based on their level of automation. The four procedures that we propose are (1) A process of gradual testing (2) Risk- and side-effect detection (3) Explainability and severity, and (4) Democratic oversight. These procedures can be used by researchers and ethics committees to enable responsible experiment with AI interventions in educational settings. Implementation and compliance will require collaboration between researchers, industry, policy makers, and educational institutions.
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Objective: The majority of parents with a disabled child experience chronic sorrow, characterized by recurrent feelings of grief and loss related to their child’s disability. There is a significant lack of research on parents’ lived experiences of chronic sorrow, which limits our ability to understand parents’ needs and provide proper support. Design: Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was conducted based on in-depth interviews with six parents of severely disabled children. Results: In the literature on chronic sorrow, an important aspect has been consistently overlooked: the particular position of being a parent, experiencing an awareness of being ultimately responsible for their children. The analysis revealed how this awareness, experienced as a deeply felt ethical commitment, unconditional, largely in isolation, and without a limit in time, shaped the experience of chronic sorrow. Because of this awareness, the parents experienced themselves facing a Herculean task of navigating their intricate motions while struggling to maintain their ability to function. Conclusions: By revealing the importance of considering the unique parental position, the study enriches the concept of chronic sorrow, simultaneously offering insights into what it means to be a parent of a disabled child. These insights can improve care professionals’ responsiveness to parental needs.
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