Schedule & Biographies

Schedule & Biographies:

November 26 - 27, 2010 | McMaster Innovation Park

Friday, November 26, 2010

9:45 am Registration and Reception
10:15 am Opening Remarks

10:30 am Lisa Schwartz, PhD, McMaster University

“Ethics in conditions of disaster and deprivation: intersection of public health and
clinical medicine”

BIOGRAPHY
Lisa Schwartz is the Arnold L. Johnson Chair in Health Care Ethics. She is an associate professor in
the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, A member of the Centre for Health
Economics and Policy Analysis (CHEPA), and an associate member in the Department of Philosophy.
Dr Schwartz received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Glasgow (1996), and both an MA
(1990) and a BA (1985) in philosophy from McGill University. She is a member of the Standing
Committee on Ethics (SCE) for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and a founding
member of the Ontario Cancer Research Ethics Board (OCREB). Dr Schwartz served as a consultant
to Cancer Care Ontario (2001-2005), advising on issues of clinical ethics. Between 1995 and 2001, Dr
Schwartz was Senior Lecturer in the Philsophy of Medicine for the School f Medicine at Glasgow
University, where she created the medical ethics teaching theme for the School of Medicine.
Currently, Dr Schwartz is responsible for the development of an ethics and moral reasoning stream of
Professional Competencies for the medical education program at McMaster University. She is a
standing member of the Clinical Ethics Committee for Hamilton Health Sciences, and member of the
McMaster Research Ethics Board Appeals Committee. She has several research interests in health
care ethics and measurement and evaluation of ethics in health care education, research ethics,
privacy and access to biosamples, and Global health ethics, especially related to humanitarian health
care practice. She has also worked as a professional actor in theatre, film, television and radio.

11:15 am Heather Draper, PhD, University of Birmingham

“Taking risks & apportioning responsibility for care in health emergencies”

BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Heather Draper is a reader in Bioethics at the University of Birmingham. Her specific interests are
in Human Rights and Detection Technologies and Bioterrorism. Draper's latest book has been 'Highly
Commended' by the British Medical Association in their annual book competition. The book, Principles
of Healthcare Ethics, is published by Wiley and is co-edited by Richard Ashcroft, Angus Dawson and
John McMillan. It is arguably the most comprehensive collection of contemporary texts in healthcare
ethics on the market.

12:00 pm Documentary Film: “Inside Disasters”
The first in a three-part documentary series and film following the Red
Cross relief effort in Haiti.

12:45-1:45 pm Lunch break

1:45 pm Mini presentation session:
Barry Pakes, Trisha Teheja, Andrew Pinto

2:30 pm Ryoa Chung, PhD, Universite de Montreal

“Pathologies of Power and the Politics of Humanitarian Intervention”

BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Chung teaches ethics and contemporary political philosophy. Her primary research focus is in the
ethics of international relations. She is also interest in the role of social justice in the field of gobal
public health, including feminist perspectives in applied political philosophy.

3:15 pm Break

3:30 pm Lydia Kapiriri, PhD, McMaster University

“Priority setting in low and middle income coutnries: The role of development
assistance”

BIOGRAPHY
Lydia Kapiriri is an Assistant Professor in the department of Health, Aging and Socirty, at McMaster
University. She is trained as a medical doctor (MUK) with a Masters degree in Public health (KIT;
MUK) and a Ph D (UIB). Her current research interests include health systems and global health
research. Previous and current research has focused on; (i) understanding the factors that influence
the health seeking behavior of underprivileged populations; (ii) community based participatory
intervention research to promote the adoption of HIV preventive behavior - specifically the use of
condoms in urban poor populations in Uganda and examining the criteria and processes used in
patient selection for access to HAART in Uganda; (iii) improving the health of urban poor populations
through urban primary health care; (iv) priority setting in health care at the different levels of decision
making (macro, meso, and micro levels) - mainly in developing countries but also comparing the ap!
proaches to priority setting in both low and high income countries - specifically Canada, and Norway.
Lydia is also interested in and involved in research related to public health and global health ethical
issues, including global health research ethics, access to HAART, pandemic flu preparedness.

4:15-5:15 pm Reception

5:15 pm Staged reading event

6:30 pm Dinner

Saturday, November 27, 2010

9:30 am Philippe Calain, MSF Switzerland

"How legitimate is medical humanitarian action?"

BIOGRAPHY
MD and PhD (virology)
Specialist in infectious diseases and tropical medicine. Missions for the World Health Organization
and other international organizations, notably in: Rwanda, Afghanistan and Lao PDR. Former medical
adviser, and currently senior researcher for the Swiss section of Médecins Sans Frontières (Geneva).
Some research interests: humanitarian medicine, international public health, resource curse and
development, public health ethics.

10:00 am Christiane Rochon, PhD (c), University of Montreal

“Military medical ethics: Toward an integrated framework”

BIOGRAPHY

10:45 am Anant Bhan, MD, Bioethics & Global Health, Pune, India

“Challenges in healthcare provision at times of disaster: examining obligations of
medical professionals”

BIOGRAPHY
Anant Bhan is a physician from India with a Masters in Bioethics from the University of Toronto Joint
Centre for Bioethics. He has worked in civil society organizations as well as with a public health
institute in India. His focus areas are bioethics and public health. Currently he works as a bioethicist
on the ESC issues in the Grand Challenges in Global Health Program and as an independent
researcher. He lives in Pune, India.

11:45-1:45 pm Discussion and Develpment Luncheon

1:45 pm Tom Sorell, BA McGill, BPhil DPhil Oxford
University of Birmingham

“Utilitarian ethics and humanitarian medicine”

BIOGRAPHY
John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Ethics.
Professor Sorell has published widely in philosophy, and has practical experience in human rights.
Before coming to Birmingham he was co-director of the Human Rights Centre at Essex University. His
research interests include the relationship between moral theory and human rights, failures of
application of moral theory, and most areas of applied ethics and other fields in philosophy. He has
also worked as a practitioner in business and human rights. He is a member of the Amnesty
International (UK) Business Section and was a member of the UK Forum on Genetics and Insurance.
His major publications include Moral Theory and Capital Punishment (1987); (with John Hendry)
Business Ethics (1994); Moral Theory and Anomaly (1999); (Ed) Health Care, Ethics, and Insurance
(1998). He is currently working on a book on the moral and political theory of emergencies.
Prof Sorell studied at McGill University as an undergraduate and received both the BPhil and the
DPhil at Oxford, where he was a Canada Council, Quebec Government and Graduate Scholar at
Balliol. He has taught at Oxford, Essex and the Open University. In 1996-97 he was Fellow in Ethics
at Harvard University.

2:30 pm Break

3:00 pm Matthew Hunt, PhD, University of Montreal

“Ethics resources for health care practice in humanitarian work”

BIOGRAPHY
Matthew Hunt is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at
McMaster University and the Centre for Research on Ethics at the University of Montreal. His
research focuses on ethical issues in global health engagement. Matthew is a member of the
research team for the project “Ethics in conditions of disaster & deprivation: learning from health
workers’ narratives.” He is a physiotherapist and has worked in Canada, the Balkans and North
Africa.

3:45 pm Closing remarks

4:00 pm Farewells

PRESENTATIONS

PLEASE NOTE:
THE FOLLOWING DRAFTS ARE NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION WITHOUT
PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR
___________

MINI PRESENTATIONS

Barry Pakes, PhD (c), University of Toronto

“The global health ethical reflection matrix: A comprehensive framework for decision
making in humanitarian assistance”

Background: Decision-makers in humanitarian crises face significant ethical dilemmas in the setting of
uncertainty, resource scarcity and urgency. The problems they encounter are often at the intersection
of clinical ethics, research ethics and public health ethics. While clinical and research ethics
frameworks have been well described for a variety of settings, a prescriptive framework for public
health decision-making is lacking. Any practical, theoretical or educational framework for public health
ethics must flexible, robust, justifiable, relatively straightforward, and capable of being applied to
diverse ethical challenges – including humanitarian assistance settings. It must also be free from the
presumption of a common value system, and be valid from numerous disparate perspectives.
Method: A detailed search and review of the public health, medical and applicable philosophy
literature was conducted. The data was dissected and synthesized into a simplified matrix that could
potentially contain most of the existent perspectives. Public health practitioners from a number of
backgrounds were surveyed – American Public Health practitioners (n=453), Canadian Public Health
Practitioners (n=67), Public Health Inspectors in Ontario (n=456). Their views were located on the
matrix and sample dilemmas were collected and analysed using qualitative and quantitative methods.
These data were re-analysed with humanitarian crises scenarios in mind and the framework was
modified accordingly.

Results: The Global Health Ethical Reflection Matrix (GHERM) was developed, populated, and
applied to a wide range of ethical dilemmas, both real and imagined, that occur in the practice of
public health in humanitarian crises. Among other factors, it considers principle, process and
outcome-oriented values, short and long-term timeframes, as well as deontological, teleological and
virtue ethics perspectives.

Conclusions and Implications: The GHERM framework is a potentially helpful tool for use, by
individual decision makers or organizations, for the identification and resolution of ethical dilemmas in
humanitarian assistance. The practical utility of this tool, its appeal and its effectiveness remain to be
tested.

Trisha Taneja, BA, Political Science & Microbiology
Humanitarian Studies Innitiative, McGill University, Montreal

“The ethics of international engagement and service learning [EIESL] project at the University
of British Columbia”

The EIESL project was first established to explore the ethical dilemmas faced by university students,
staff and faculty as they worked in international settings for the purposes of research or service
learning. The aim of this project is to create an ‘ethical dialogue’ on campus, as well as to create
mediums to offer a foundational ethical education. The project conducted interviews with students
and faculty through large scale dialogue sessions and smaller interviews, in order to identify the gaps
in practical ethical education at UBC. After consolidating the results, five main themes were
discovered that encapsulated this lack of ethical preparation the UBC community felt before going
abroad. Using these themes, the project created a web-based guide book that presented a foundation
of ethical education through the medium of theoretical ethical frameworks and case studies. These
case studies were written based on interviews conducted with development organisations as well as their community partners abroad. The information in the guidebook is also being used to prepare
‘ethical toolkits,’ workshops, as well as integrated academic course content at UBC.
Please note: The EIESL project is funded by the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund at UBC,
and is run by the Centre for International Health and Go Global UBC.

Relevance: We believe that EIESL is relevant to this conference for two main reasons. Firstly, most
universities send medical students and/or residents abroad for either research projects or medical
relief work without any formal ethical education. Secondly, students that go abroad for international
service learning projects should have a basic education about the ethics of intervention that they can
keep with them in case they choose to work abroad in the future as humanitarians.

Andrew Pinto, PhD (c), University of Toronto

“Actual histories as the foundation for humanitarian assistance”

Humanitarian assistance is often dependent on the rapid provision of government grants, international
loans and private donations. Such funds allow a broad group of organizations to act, delivering
services and addressing immediate needs. Driving this is an innate and visceral urge to help others in
need, sometimes called the “humanitarian impulse”. Worryingly, this impulse is often fitful, fragmented
and arbitrary. One can see this clearly in the global response to different disasters, from the 2004
Indonesian tsunami, to the 2010 Haitian earthquake and to the 2010 flooding in Pakistan. Further,
media coverage and pronouncements from donor countries on such events are often devoid of a
deeper, historical analysis of the unnatural factors that exacerbate such disasters. Acknowledging
actual histories can change the work of governments, health professionals and humanitarian aid
providers. It can help with international and local priority setting, the decision-making process and
ensure that leadership emerges from the communities affected rather than externally. It can change
how funds are raised and the narrative that is projected and becomes dominant. Finally, it can play a
role in transforming the humanitarian impulse into a force that supports indigenous institutions and
capabilities on an ongoing basis. Actual histories are part of developing global solidarity in times of
disaster.

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