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Responding to the ‘crowd’ of voices and opinions in the paediatric clinical space: an ethics perspective
  1. Clare Delany1,
  2. Bryanna Moore2,
  3. Neera Bhatia3,
  4. Elise Burn4,
  5. Neil Wimalasundera5,
  6. Anne Preisz6,7
  1. 1 Department of Medical Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  2. 2 Institute for Bioethics and Health Humanities, University of Texas McGovern Medical School, Houston, Texas, USA
  3. 3 School of Law, Deakin University Faculty of Business and Law, Burwood, Victoria, Australia
  4. 4 Centre for Children's Health Ethics and Law, Queensland Children's Hospital, South Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
  5. 5 Department of Rehabilitation, Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  6. 6 Clinical Ethics, Sydney Children's Hospitals Network, Westmead, New South Wales, Australia
  7. 7 Sydney Health Ethics, The University of Sydney Faculty of Medicine and Health, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  1. Correspondence to Professor Clare Delany, Children's Bioethics Centre, The Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia; c.delany{at}unimelb.edu.au

Abstract

Ready access to the internet and online sources of information about child health and disease has allowed people more ‘distant’ from a child, family and paediatric clinician to inform and influence clinical decisions. It has also allowed parents to share aspects of their child’s health and illness to garner support or funding for treatment. As a consequence, paediatric clinicians must consider and incorporate the crowd of opinions and voices into their clinical and ethical reasoning.

We identify two key ethical principles and related ethics concepts foundational to this task. We then propose a series of exploratory ethics questions to assist paediatric clinicians to engage ethically with the multiple voices in the clinical encounter while keeping the child’s needs as a central focus. Using two clinical hypothetical case examples, we illustrate how our proposed ethics questions can assist paediatric clinicians to navigate the crowd in the room and bring moral reasoning to bear.

We highlight a need for specific practical interactional skills training to assist clinicians to ethically respond to the crowd in the room, including to identify and weigh up the harms and benefits of endorsing or going against proposed treatments for a child, and how to discuss social media and online sources of information with parents.

  • Ethics
  • Paediatrics
  • Technology

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Footnotes

  • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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