Telling Moments explores ethical practice across the range of health care disciplines. It focuses not only on ethical analysis and decision-making, but also on the more subtle, and often more important art of 'ethical mindfulness'.
The book presents five very personal stories of health care practice, and engages in depth with each of them. The stories are written by health care practitioners (a nurse, a naturopath, a genetic counsellor) and the two authors; one of the authors writes from a patient's perspective, the other from the perspective of a family-member of a patient.
The stories deal with everyday ethics: the everyday ethical events and issues that practitioners and patients alike face in health care practice, issues such as, when to speak up when you know something is not quite right, whether to hug a patient you are caring for when you feel they need support, or how much of the truth to tell a patient. Despite their everydayness, these moments are ethically charged.
Through these stories, readers are introduced to a narrative approach to health ethics that first acknowledges everyday ethics in health care as significant. The approach combines conventional bioethics principles, sociology, and narrative analysis to understand what is ethically at stake in these stories, and provides a way of engaging with the stories. The aim is to promote ethical mindfulness and enhance ethical practice in health care, in ways that are informed not just by abstract ethical principles but by real life events.
For health care students and experienced practitioners alike, Telling Moments will bring health ethics alive. Without shirking the difficulties or presenting simplistic answers, the authors open up the richly complex ethical dimensions of health care practice in ways that are clear and engaging. |
