David M. Browning, MSW, BCD is Senior Scholar and Co-Director of Patient Safety and Quality Initiatives at the Institute for Professionalism and Ethical Practice, Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB).  His practice as a medical educator is aimed at promoting collaborative learning to bring about enhanced professionalism, improved clinical practice, and organizational change.  His current projects focus on the everyday ethics of healthcare communication and improving care integration within the medical home. He is a member of the CHB Ethics Advisory Committee and a recipient, along with the rest of the IPEP leadership team, of the CHB Academy’s 2010 Medical Educator Award for Innovative Scholarship in Medical Education. From 2002 to 2010, Mr. Browning was a Senior Research Scientist at Education Development Center, Inc., where he directed the Initiative for Pediatric Palliative Care, a nationally-acclaimed, interdisciplinary educational program for clinicians serving children with life-threatening conditions and their families. 

 

Mr. Browning is a recipient of the Social Work Leadership Development Award from the Open Society Institute. He served as an advisor to the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine’s College of Palliative Care and as a faculty consultant to Advocating for Clinical Excellence, a transdisciplinary palliative care education project based at the City of Hope National Medical Center. He is a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and co-teaches the advanced practice seminar in the Palliative and End-of-Life Care Certificate Program at Smith College School for Social Work.  His recent publications have focused on the everyday ethics of healthcare communication in front-line practice.

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Friday
Mar182011

“Microethical and Relational Insights from Pediatric Palliative Care”

DateFriday, March 18, 2011 at 12:06PM

 If we want to address the moral and ethical challenges of everyday health care, we will need to expand our vision beyond a narrowly constructed medical lens and adopt a wider and more lucid perspective, one that honors the mind but also encompasses the heart, the spirit, and the relational world in which we all live. In order to see the right things and not lose our focus, we will need to learn differently together than we have heretofore. The first step in unraveling many of our wicked “macro” problems will be to discern the “micro” ethics that will help to solve them—things like treating people respectfully, telling the truth, listening to oft-silenced voices, and valuing the knowledge of patients, family members, and health care workers who are lower on the totem pole of power.

 “Microethical and Relational Insights from Pediatric Palliative Care”

Good practice in pediatric hospice and palliative care requires a grounded sense of connectedness with children and families who are going through some of the most difficult experiences life has to offer.  When we practice well in this domain, we bring an everyday ethical sensibility to our relationships with patients, families, and our fellow professionals.  Doing this work gives us knowledge and insights that are applicable to many of the more challenging problems in mainstream health care facing us in  the twenty-first century.

The excerpt above is from a commentary I wrote  for the July 2010 edition of Virtual Mentor, the ethics journal for the American Medical Association.  If you would like to read the entire article, it is available online to download at

http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2010/07/pdf/medu1-1007.pdf

 

David M. Browning, MSW, BCD

Senior Scholar and Co-Director of Patient Safety and Quality Initiatives

Institute for Professionalism and Ethical Practice

Children's Hospital Boston & Harvard Medical School

Email: david.browning@childrens.harvard.edu

Website: www.ipepweb.org



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