CFP: ISPHC/Harvard Ethics Priorities Conferences

The International Society on Priorities in Health Care (ISPHC) invites you to attend its next conference, Priorities 2010. This year’s conference theme will be Priority Setting in Difficult Economic Times. This timely topic will allow us to squarely address the financial crisis that has challenged the ability of health systems across the globe with questions about how to prioritize and deliver affordable health care. Coming earlier than our usual meeting time in October, the meeting is scheduled back-to-back with the Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health 5th Annual International Conference which will focus this year on the ethics of procedures in priority setting. Our forthcoming conference website will provide details on both conferences. Please save the date, submit an abstract and plan to join us at this year’s meeting.

Call for Abstracts Opens October 20, 2009!

Conference Web Site: www.Organizational-Services.com/Priorities2010

Society Web Site: www.HealthCarePriorities.org

Key Dates:

• Call for abstracts opens October 20, 2009
• Call for abstracts closes December 18, 2009
• Abstract decision January 22, 2010

Registration: Early bird registration closes March 19, 2010

Conference Dates: Friday, April 23 to Sunday, April 25, 2010

US Senate Brings Healthcare Bill to Floor for Debate

The US Senate tonight by a vote of 60 to 40 (along party lines) passed a procedural vote to permit its healthcare bill to be brought to the floor for debate, which should preoccupy the Senate until the Christmas recess.

USDA: Growing Hunger in America

According to a recent US Department of Agriculture report, noted in today’s Washington Post in “More Americans Going Hungry” by Amy Goldstein, households dealing with food shortages shot up to 49 million (nearly15%), the largest number since the government began keeping data. Households with children account for 21%.

CFS: Improving Safety in Maternity Care (Midwifery)

Call for papers to a special issue of Midwifery:

New approaches to researching and improving safety in maternity care

Deadline: 1 February 2010

The adverse impact of poor quality and unsafe care on women’s health and well-being is becoming an increasingly prominent concern for policy makers, clinicians and the public worldwide. In response to the global need to improve patient safety the World Health Organization formed the World Alliance for Patient Safety who have identified a global set of research priorities in relation to maternal and newborn care. However, the evidence base for many strategies remains limited and empirical evidence about the impact of many safety solutions when translated into the real world is very slim indeed. In essence, the field consists of much hope, anecdotal tales of the process of implementation but very little evidence of impact on outcome, or understanding of consequences (intended and unintended) of implementing safety solutions in complex organizations. It is clear that quality and safety is multi-disciplinary activity and that much can be learned outside of maternity and health care. In addition, the value that other theoretical perspectives can bring to illuminate understanding is great. As a result, we wish to commission a Special Issue of Midwifery which will broaden the scope of existing approaches to safety and quality of care by inviting papers which report on research that engages with work at the frontline and the organizational level, which uses methods that are sensitive to clinical and organisational complexity, and that displays awareness of the impact of the research process itself on healthcare delivery and organisation.

Midwifery is an international journal and we are keen to include papers from a wide range of countries, including non-western settings. Research foci might include the implications for safety and quality of care of research conducted at the micro, macro and meso level. Methods can include, among others, ethnographic observation; evaluation of complex interventions, narrative and discourse analysis; improvement methodologies, comparative research and the use of visual methods. In policy terms the special issue aims to contribute to informing the activities and strategies to improve the safety of maternal and newborn care by drawing on different and wider perspectives.

We would like to invite authors from a range of backgrounds who feel their work addresses the above methodological and contextual aims to submit their full manuscripts for consideration to Midwifery at http://ees.elsevier.com/ymidw/  by 1 February 2010. When asked to choose article type, authors should select ‘‘Special Issue: Safety in Maternity Care’’, and in the ‘‘Enter Comments’’ box any further acknowledgements should be inserted. All submissions should meet Midwifery author guideline.

Click on this link to access the full call for submissions.

New Link: Directory of Open Access Journals

A new link added to our “Blinks” list, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), maintained by the Swedish Lund University Libraries. As the home page notes:

This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 4434 journals in the directory. Currently 1697 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 326846 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

Journals are categorized by subject, including 28 nursing journals (as well as journals of medicine, dentistry, and public health). Journals outside North America appear to be generously represented.

Veterans Day

Today, November 11, we mark Veterans Day (which started out earlier in the 20th century as “Armistice Day” to mark the end of World War I).

Wartime and military nurses have served an indispensable role in the history of nursing. In some ways, wartime nursing precipitated the professionalization of nursing, with the founder of professional nursing, Florence Nightingale, in the Crimean War, and Clara Barton during the American Civil War.

Wartime nursing with its emphasis on trauma care and infection control has revolutionized health care for civilians.

Military nurses are sometimes thought of as performing non-combat roles, which is technically correct, but that does not mean that they do so without great risk. One of my ancestors, Pauline McVey McCarthy, served in France during World War I, often at great risk to her safety. Today, nurses also serve in dangerous duty.

This past week we noted that one of those killed in the shootings at the Ft. Hood Army base was a nurse and nurse educator, Russell Seager. You can learn more about him at:

http://nursingwriting.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/rn-among-ft-hood-slain/

As you conduct your sacred profession, we remember your courage and sacrifice.

CFA: NLN Education Summit 2010

Call for Abstracts

Abstracts are invited for presentation at the National League of Nursing Education Summit 2010, the premier conference for nursing faculty that is attended by approximately 1,500 individuals from all types of programs in the U.S. and other countries. The Summit offers many exciting features, including a keynote address, three plenary sessions, numerous exhibits, 60 posters, 84 concurrent sessions, an awards banquet, the induction of fellows into the Academy of Nursing Education, the presentation of Centers of Excellence schools and grant/scholarship recipients, and the annual faculty, business, and town hall meetings. It is a time for nurse educators and leaders to network and share innovative practices, educational research findings, creative approaches to teaching and evaluation, and ideas on collaborating to achieve excellence in nursing education.

Full details at: http://www.nln.org/Summit/index.htm

NLN: Health Care Bill Passes House

As announced today by Kathleen A. Ream, director of Government Affairs of the National League of Nursing:

After months of debate and negotiations, the House of Representatives approved the most ambitious effort ever to change the country’s health care system, with 219 Democrats and one Republican voting for the bill and 39 Democrats voting against the bill. Action will now turn to the Senate Democrats who have yet to bring their bill to the floor for debate.

Permit me a personal note. As a boy of the tender age of 7 in early fall of 1960, I sat with my parents in the front row center of the gallery of the US Senate the night that Medicare first came up for a vote. Seated directly across from us on the floor of the Senate was Richard M. Nixon, vice president of the United States and in that capacity president of the Senate. Seated directly below us was the junior senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Both men were candidates for the presidency.

That night, the bill that would have created Medicare went down in defeat by only a few votes. My mother’s parents, who were in declining health at the time, would be dead (my grandmother) or dying (my grandfather) by the time Medicare legislation was finally passed in 1965, their income exhausted by healthcare expenses.

It has been estimated that nearly 50,000 Americans die annually as a direct or indirect result of a lack of health insurance. If we can mobilize public support (or at least public acquiescence) for a variety of costly and unproductive endeavors, why not to save lives and improve quality of life?

CFS: Health, Culture, Body International Conference

Call for abstracts: An International and interdisciplinary conference on Health, Culture and the Human Body

Epidemiology, ethics and history of medicine, perspectives from Central Europe and Turkey

Mainz, Germany, 17-19 September 2010

The face of medicine is rapidly evolving: New developments in medicine, preventive and therapeutic interventions are raising novel ethical questions in societies undergoing fast demographic change at home while participating in global interactions through travel and migration. Throughout history, the perception of health and illness and the ethical assessment of medical practices have often been different between diverse value-cultures. This may affect the responses to well-established themes in medicine, such as the control of infectious diseases, attitudes towards a person’s death, or culturally specific approaches to dealing with the integrity of the human body. Consequently, these ethical considerations have given rise to complex ethical debates resulting in different legal regulations of these developments in different countries.

The international conference “Health, Culture and the Human Body” will focus on selected cases from Turkey, Germany, and other countries. These countries have been closely connected by substantial migration processes for some fifty years. Historically, these countries were linked by medical sciences and clinical practice. These interactions will be analysed jointly from historical, epidemiological, and ethical perspectives, paving the way for the implementation of an interdisciplinary “medicine studies” approach in the field of intercultural and migration medicine.

(See also: www.springer.com/philosophy/philosophy+of+sciences/journal/12376 )

The chosen thematic areas are:

§ infectious diseases (e.g., plague, leprosy, cholera, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS)

§ the end of life (e.g., patient autonomy vs. family autonomy, advance directives, active and passive euthanasia, palliative care)

§ dealing with the human body (e.g., anatomical research, organ donation, biomaterial in international studies)

§ migration and medicine

Abstracts (max. 250 words) of proposed conference papers need to be submitted by 31 January 2010,

to the attention of Ilhan Ilkilic MD PhD, E-Mail: ilkilic@uni-mainz.de  (Institute for History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany)

Phone +49-(0)-6131-39-37343, Fax +49-(0)-6131-39-36682

Publication of selected papers is envisaged.

Venue: Mainz Academy of Letters and Sciences, Mainz, Germany

Organising institutions:

* JohannesGutenberg University Mainz Medical Centre (Germany)

* IstanbulUniversity (Turkey)

CFP: Penn Medical Humanities Meeting

Call for proposals: Pennsylvania Medical Humanities Consortium Eighth Annual Meeting, May 19-20, 2010
College of Physicians, Philadelphia, PA
Deadline for abstracts: 31 January 2010
Through the Lens of Time: Perspectives on Medicine and Health Care

The Eighth Annual Pennsylvania Medical Humanities Consortium meeting will be held at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 19 South 22nd Street, (between Chestnut & Market Streets; an easy walk from 30th Street Station) on Wednesday evening May 19 through Thursday afternoon, May 20, 2010.

To explore this year’s theme, Through the Lens of Time: Perspectives on Medicine and Health Care, we are seeking abstracts of papers as well as proposals for panels, workshops, readings or performances that meet the following criteria:

● They examine a topic relevant to medicine and health care from a historical perspective.

● The approach represents the orientation of at least one of the medical humanities (including history, literature and the arts, bioethics,philosophy, religious studies, and social sciences such as cultural studies, disabilities studies, medical sociology, psychology, and anthropology).

● They are of general interest to a diverse group.

● They promise to serve as a departure point for lively group discussion.

All presenters must be registered conference participants. We particularly welcome submissions from students at all levels and from all relevant disciplines. (Through support from the Wood Institute for the History of Medicine, registration fees will be waived for all student presenters and for the first twenty student registrants.) Please keep in mind that the Consortium strives to be a different venue from the usual academic meeting. Rather than having a series of presentations with minimal time for Q & A, the consortium focuses on collegial discussion and the sharing of ideas. Paper presentations should be brief (no more than 10 – 15 minutes). They should be catalysts for discussion rather than ends in themselves. Panels, workshops, readings and performances will be allowed 60 – 90 minutes, to be divided as the planning committee deems equitable, based on their content and the number of participants.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

● The impact of the Flexner Report (1910) on healthcare education, then and now

● The symbols of medicine

● Changing representations of health and illness in literature, art, photography, film, music, dance or mass media

● Historical and contemporary perceptions/constructs of the body

● Images of health practitioners and/or health care institutions through the ages

● Evolving relationships between members of the health care team

● Shifting paradigms in the provision of primary care

● Returning care from the hospital to the home

● “Disability” and disabilities studies in historical context

● Gender issues in medicine and health care

● Historicizing the constructs/contexts of maternity, paternity and/or “family”

● Evolving perceptions of ageing and “the good death”

● Contemporizing historical medical collections

● The “new” economics of health care

We welcome interdisciplinary work as well as that of single disciplines. Please send abstracts (250 words) and proposals (one page) electronically as an attachment in Word (not in the body of an email) by January 31, 2010 to David H. Flood, PhD

David.Flood@Drexel.edu

http://www.collphyphil.org –click on Library & Wood Institute