6 May,2016

AABHL 2016 Conference

Thurs 24 - Sat 26 November 2016, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Bioethics and health law at the intersections

Conference themes include; Relationships between ethics and law; The role of advocacy in bioethics and health law; Emerging technologies; Professionalism and/or ethics

Key dates:

Call for abstracts opens: March 11, 2016

Deadline for submission of abstracts: June 6, 2016

Notification of acceptance of abstracts: July 29, 2016

Pre and post conference workshops

Clinical Ethics: Wed 23 Nov (in conjunction with Australasian Clinical Ethics network)

Postgraduate Students Group: Thurs 24 Nov

Teaching Health Ethics: Sun 27 Nov

2016 Intensive Bioethics Course

Friday December 2 – Monday December 5, 2016

Country Place Retreat, Dandenong Ranges, Victoria, Australia

The Monash Centre for Human Bioethics offers an intensive three day course in bioethics, which isrunning for the 32nd time in 2016, from Friday December 2 to Monday December 5.

The Course consists ofseminars, forums and discussions led by leading experts in bioethics. The Course outlines general ethical frameworks and specific ethical principles underpinned by those frameworks. It then proceeds to focus on application of these frameworks and principles to major topics and questions in contemporary bioethics, including end of life care and decision making, clinical ethics/ethics committees, research on humans, reproductive ethics, health care resource allocation, prenatal genetic screening, public health ethics, ethics of organ transplantation, dual use research, human embryonic stem cell research and the commodification of human gametes.

Registration is to open in April, 2016. Limited space available.

For all inquiries, please contact Dr. Ryan Tonkens:

Symposia, Seminarsand Conferences

Monday 30th May 2016

Sydney Ideas and the Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney panel discussion with audience Q&A on the topic of Wiser Healthcare,

"We all want to be able to get good healthcare when we need it. But what would it mean to provide and consume healthcare wisely?

This panel discussion and Q&A will consider a radical idea: that sometimes wiser healthcare means less healthcare. Or at least, less healthcare for people who don’t need it, so we can give more healthcare to people who do.For more information and registration, please go to:

Wednesday 7th – Friday 9th September 2016.

The Children’s Bioethics Centre will be hosting the 8th National Paediatric Bioethics Conference.

This year’s conference theme “Navigating uncertainty” provides the opportunity to explore ethical decision-making in a range of high-stakes contexts where uncertainty is a complicating factor.

Theme’s include:

New treatments, uncertain benefits and risks

Searching for a diagnosis

Hope – a small chance or no chance at all, false hope, hoping for breakthroughs, hoping for miracles

Waiting for transplants

The child’s experience of treatment and hospitalisation – what is it really like?

Things that keep us awake at night.

We invite abstracts for oral presentations and de-identified cases for discussion. For general enquiries or to register your interest, please email Karen Fellows .

Call For Abstracts

Deadline for abstracts: 30th May 2016.

Disability, Arts and Health Conference, 1-2 September 2016 in Bergen, Norway:

This conference aims to reflect critically on how disability is represented and theorised in contemporary society, both in an academic context and outside the academy, including by clinical practitioners, community activists, mainstream media and creative arts practitioners.

Deadline for abstracts: 16th May 2016

Ethics and Politics of Community Engagement in Global Health Research. University of Oxford, 20-21 September 2016

We invite proposals for papers for the workshop, which will be held at Trinity College, Oxford University from 20-21 September 2016. We invite scholars and practitioners that approach the problem of ‘engagement’ from divergent perspectives, including: (1) applied health research and bioethics, (2) science and technology studies, (3) applied and theoretical anthropology and sociology, (4) development studies, and (5) political science.

If interested in participating, please send a brief abstract of your proposed paper, a CV, and a brief statement of financial need (if requesting travel support) to the workshop organizers Salla Sariola (<mailto:>) and Lindsey Reynolds (<mailto:>) by 16 May.

Conference Announcements

6th June 2016

Religion and Bioethics Padova, Italy

23rd August 2016

3rd International Conference on Islamization in Modern Sciences & Scientification of Islamic Studies: Bioethics Kuantan, Malaysia

11thOctober 2016-

2nd International Healthcare Management Conference (IHMC) Wilkes-Barre, United States of America

21st October 2016

2WCII2016: 2nd World Congress on Integration and Islamicisation: Focus On Medical and Health Care Sciences KUANTAN, Malaysia

11-12th November 2016

International Conference On Narratives Of Health And Illness, Tenerife (Spain)

Organised by DIPEx International, Fundacion Iotras de Humanidades Medicas, DIPEx-es, Universidad de La Laguna

Dead line for abstracts: May 31st

Early-bird registration August 31st

Resources

Do healthcare professionals owe a duty of care to anyone other than their patients?

In Connor Smith v University of Leicester NHS Trust [2016] EWHC 817 (QB) HHJ McKenna sitting as a Judge in the High Court struck out claims by or on behalf of two second cousins of a patient, Mr Craven, who had adrenomyeloneuropathy (AMN) a genetic condition. It was alleged that there had been negligent delay in diagnosing the AMN with the result that his two infant second cousins were late in being diagnosed and treated. One had died by the time the action was brought.

The Judge applied the High Court decision in ABC v St Georges Healthcare NHS Trust [2015] EWHC 1394 (QB), a decision of Nicol J, which is under appeal, in which a patient with Huntington's Disease had refused permission to the Defendant Trust to notify his daughter of the diagnosis. She was pregnant at the time. She later gave birth and a doctor accidentally told her of her father's condition. She was found to have the disease herself but it was not yet known whether her child had it. The claim was struck out.

In Connor Smith, the Claimant sought to distinguish ABC on the grounds that Mr Craven would readily have consented to his diagnosis being shared with family members. There was no issue of confidentiality. HHJ McKenna was not swayed by that argument and found that the Claimants' claim would mark a very significant departure from the current law.

He noted the case of Selwood v Durham CC [2012] EWCA Civ 979 in which the Court of Appeal held that it was possible for the court to find that an NHS Trust owed a duty of care to a social worker who was in contact with a psychiatric patient, to protect her from harm from that patient. He found that the facts in Selwood were very different from those in Smith.

Floodgates, as we all know, are meant to remain closed. If second cousins could have valid claims then potentially so would all manner of relatives in similar cases. But perhaps there will be other situations which would test the courts' commitment to restricting the scope of duty. Suppose a patient was wrongly discharged home harbouring a contagious infection which was transmitted to a family member living with them. A patient might injure a spouse when suffering a seizure when driving a car after a failure to diagnose a serious head injury. Some decisions to discharge a patient place a heavy onus on a spouse or other carer at home, for example the discharge of a psychiatric patient who, even though in the community, needs considerable care and supervision. Suppose it was known, or ought to have been known, that the carer would have considerable difficulty carrying out the role of carer or supervisor, and that they went on to suffer psychiatric or physical injury themselves because of having to look after the patient. If it was negligent to have discharged that patient, should the Trust be liable for the injury to the carer?

In some cases there may be conflicts, or potential conflicts of interest between the patient and the potential claimant. In others, their interests will fully coincide. In some cases the claimant will not be known to the healthcare professionals, in others they will be well known and have had repeated contact with the Defendant, its employees and agents. In some cases the harm to the claimant will have arisen in unlikely circumstances, in others it will have been readily foreseeable, It is easy to imagine circumstances in which there was considerable proximity between defendant and the (non-patient) claimant, and in which the harm was readily foreseeable. Will the policy remain against widening the scope of the duty of care or will the threeCaparo principles be found to apply?

The current trend in restricting secondary victim claims has been particularly telling in clinical negligence cases where there is often a distance in time between the negligence and the "event" that causes nervous shock/psychiatric injury to the claimant. Given the courts' current attitude to such claims, the prospect of expanding the scope of the duty of care to any non-patients might seem remote. We can expect more judicial guidance following the appeal in ABC which is apparently due for hearing in early 2017.

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