The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics is offering several new summer courses in Bioethics through the Berman Institute Bioethics Intensives (BI2)program. BI2 provides an engaging bioethics educational opportunity for students; medical, legal, and policy professionals; researchers; scholars; and others. The first BI2, offered in June 2012, will provide a series of weeklong courses in both foundational and emerging topics in bioethics.
Participants will engage with Berman Institute faculty from the Johns Hopkins University’s world-renowned schools of medicine, public health, nursing, and arts & sciences. BI2 faculty represent the Berman Institute’s five areas of focus: biomedical research and discovery; ethics of clinical practice; public health ethics and health policy; research ethics; and global health ethics and research. Over 30 faculty members of the Berman Institute teach, study, and provide service to help inform and guide some of the most difficult decisions affecting the health of individuals and society.
Courses are being offered during the weeks of June 4-8 and June 11-15, 2012. Participants may enroll in one or more courses being offered during the morning, afternoon, or evening. Each course will last 5 days and will meet for 3 hours each day. Multi-course discounts are available.
This course offers an introduction to the foundational approaches and issues in bioethics, including a discussion of the history of the field and the issues that led to its birth and growth. Sessions will be led by senior faculty of the Berman Institute, offering students the opportunity to gain from the experience of some of the most respected scholars in the field. Faculty will present discussions of foundational approaches and discussion of issues based on their disciplinary expertise and experience in the field, including theoretical approaches and ethics and policy in research, empirical methodology and informed consent, public health policy and health ethics, and genetics and public health policy.
Confronting the daily challenges of providing quality, safe care while honoring patient/family preferences and preserving integrity, requires that ethics be integrated into day-to-day clinical practice. Clinical complexity and differences in orientation by members of the inter-professional team creates an environment where confusion and conflict can be exacerbated and integrity compromised.
This inter-professional course expands clinician’s repertoire of tools to address key ethical issues in clinical practice. Using experiential practices, case studies and role play, participants will discover the myriad ethical issues that arise in everyday practice through the lens of caring for people living with chronic, hard to diagnose, or life-limiting conditions. Content will focus on the relational aspects of ethically grounded clinical practice including communication, decision making under conditions of uncertainty and competing ethical claims, and exploring the boundaries of professionalism by examining moral distress, claims of conscience and integrity. An inter-professional team will facilitate each session. Theory and scientific evidence will be provided as background and the findings integrated into the interactive sessions.
This course is accredited for full Johns Hopkins human subject recertification (100 points)
The course provides an introduction to the ethics of human subject research. Ethical theory and principles are introduced, followed by a brief history of research ethics and the US Federal regulations that guide the ethical conduct of research. Topics covered in lectures and moderated discussions include: informed consent for research participation; role and function of institutional review boards; just selection of research subjects; ethical aspects of study design; and privacy and confidentiality.
In-class exercises will include case discussions as well as informed consent and protocol review exercises.
This objective of this course is to increase participants’ awareness of and ability to reason through ethical issues that arise in the conduct of human subject research. This course will introduce participants to ethics concepts and allow for their application to questions and challenges in conducting human subject research.
This course will examine the ethical issues that arise in both public health practice and public health research, and will discuss whether there is an ethics of public health that is distinct from bioethics or medical ethics. Topics to be addressed include: the right to health and health care, global justice and health, individual liberties and public health, ethics and public health interventions, and ethics and public health surveillance.
Ethics and law both focus on what is normatively “right” behavior, but while ethics tells us what we ought to do, law tells us what we must do (or face penalties). This course, intended for non-lawyers, will introduce participants to the way the American legal system approaches issues at the intersection of law and bioethics. How do courts and legislatures translate ethical norms into legal rules in this context? We will address this question by focusing on five topics, devoting one day of class to each: 1) Sterilization and Contraception; 2) Abortion and the Legal Status of the Fetus; 3) Informed Consent in Clinical Care; 4) End-of-Life Decision Making; and 5) Regulation of Biomedical Research. Each day, through a combination of lecture and discussion, course participants will engage with the foundational legal cases and theories. Participants will consider legal principles, such as privacy and liberty; the content and consistency of current law; the policy goals motivating legal regulation; and the ways in which ethical issues are (and are not) articulated in legal opinions.
This course will examine the ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of advances in genetics and genomics through the lens of different segments of the population and different health and medical contexts. The course provides a review of the scientific basis of genetics followed by applications and implications of genetic science for pregnancy and prenatal care, adult medicine, pediatric care, public health, and law.
Upon successfully completing this course, participants will be able to:
Identify ethical, legal and social issues raised by advances in genetic science;
Describe the morally relevant similarities and differences in theclinical applicationof genetic technologies across the lifespan, i.e., in the contexts of prenatal, pediatric and adult medicine; and,
Discuss thepublic health applicationsof advances in genetics and genomics and their implications for the general population.
The program registration form can be downloaded here in PDF format.
Eligible JHU employees who wish to use tuition remission should visit the JHU tuition remission site to also download, complete, and subit a tuition remission form.
Completed registration forms should be emailed to bioethics@jhu.edu or sent via mail to:
Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics
1809 Ashland Avenue
Deering Hall, Room 211
Baltimore, MD 21205
USA
If you have any questions about registration, please send an email to bioethics@jhu.edu
The Berman Institute of Bioethics is conveniently located on the medical campus of Johns Hopkins University near downtown Baltimore: one hour from Washington, DC, two hours from Philadelphia, and three hours from New York City. There are numerous reasonable travel options for participants from neighboring cities and states. We are a short taxi ride from BWI Airport, Baltimore’s Penn Station (train), the Baltimore Inner Harbor, the National Aquarium, as well as many museums and hotels.
