Seeking practical solutions to challenging situations.

Applied Ethics in IR

There seems to be a disconnect between common approaches to ethics and day-to-day clinical work. Despite a large amount of ethics literature, this work can seem abstract and not as practical or useful to clinicians.

I wanted to test an applied, specialty-specific approach to ethics and used my own specialty (Interventional Radiology) as a kind of lab. In 2019, I founded a multi-institutional working group to generate ethics literature, awareness, and education. Rather than a top-down approach, we worked bottom-up, starting with an understanding of what issues were most salient to IRs and how they were approaching these issues. We then used that understanding in combination with ethical theory to develop interventions and resources that are perceived as more effective and practical.