A campus organization researching mortality in health care sponsored an open house to educate the community about ethics education, scholarship and service and improving the overall quality of health care.
The open house was sponsored Thursday off-campus.
The Institute for Ethics, which is a division of UNM's Health Sciences Center, was formed after the development and success of the Empirical Ethics Group in 1996. It is a multidisciplinary education resource seeking to improve biomedical ethics in health care by refining clinical decisions through empirical enquiry.
"The uniqueness of the empirical group is that its research is evidence-based," said Katherine Green Hammond, a biostatistician working with the research group. "We actually go out and talk to patients and people in the community to gather real world answers to the question of how to better health care."
According to an Empirical Ethics Group newsletter, the multidisciplinary team, consisting of experts from multiple disciplines such as social and clinical psychology, as well as sociology and statistics, has been developing substantial ethics research and education capacities while performing a number of conceptual and evidence-anchored clinical ethics studies.
Hammond said that the Institute for Ethics has come a long way since its conception earlier this year, growing from a small research project to a thriving organization complete with an official building housing the institute as well as the Empirical Ethics Group, providing them a core from which to conduct research from.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
"This research is important as it provides the perspective of treating patients as people who have families and a future, rather than just numbers," Hammond said. "Ethics is all about treating people right."
John Gluck, a UNM psychology professor and senior bioethisist with the Institute for Ethics, said that all ethics-related issues have a human component. Gluck said that the institute is successful in bettering the ethical standards in health care because it realizes this and uses that information in addressing real world problems.
"Our goal is improving the notion that ethics is a public and pragmatic entity," he said.
Hammond said that there are two components of the work that the Institute for Ethics and the Empirical Ethics Group use to accomplish their goals. The first is teaching ethics to health care professionals, as well as to citizens, to ensure that they understand their rights when it comes to the standards of care they should receive. The second is broad-based research, which she said is imperative to developing a mutually beneficial health care system.
"Doing human research on the changing ethical issues ensures that facilities understand their role and that patients are received and treated fairly," Hammond said.
Laura Roberts, an M.D. and director of both the Empirical Ethics Group and the Institute for Ethics, said that the institute is committed to helping health care professionals, students, policy makers and community members explore the challenging ethical questions that have accompanied advances in science and changes in the health care industry.
She said that the open house was a way of extending an open invitation to community members to visit the office and learn that both groups are here to help people understand their ethical rights and answer any question they may have.
"Our doors are always open to anyone interested in learning about ethics and the progress being made to improve them in the health care system," Roberts said. "I hope that more students will get involved and take advantages of the services we are here to provide."
