Rationing health care fairly: what have we learned and how do we go from there?
Date:  du 07/08/2009  au 07/10/2009
Place:  Brocher Centre
Description

Scientific organisers:

Samia Hurst MD

Samia Hurst is a physician and a bioethicist. After doctoral work in tropical medicine and certification in internal medicine, during which she started her training in bioethics, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda from 2001 to 2003. She joined the Institute for Biomedical Ethics at the Geneva University Medical School in 2003. She is consultant ethicist to the Clinical ethics council of the Geneva University Hospitals (HUG) and, until 2008, cheffe de clinique in the General Internal Medicine service at the HUG. During her stay in Bethesda, she participated in teaching topics in bioethics at the NIH, George Mason University (Washington), and Johns Hopkins (Baltimore). She now participates in teaching bioethics at the Geneva University faculty of sciences, humanities, and medical school, at the Yaoundé Medical School (Cameroon), the HUG, and training programs for midwives and paramedics.

Samia Hurst is one of the founding members of the European Clinical Ethics Network, and is a member of the International Association of Bioethics, the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities, the Neuroethics Society, the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, as well as vice-president of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Ethics. She is chief editor of Bioethica Forum, which she helped promote as a peer-reviewed publication, member of the editorial committee of InfoKara, member of the research ethics committee of the Internal Medicine Department at the HUG and of the WHO’s Ethical Review Committee. She was a member of the « rationing » task force for the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, and of the consultation group on Life science research and global health security at the WHO.

She coordinates the international Values at the Bedside study since 2001, and is since 2005 the recipient of a PROSPER grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation for the Justice at the Bedside study. Her publications and research interests focus on equity in clinical practice and health care systems, Development, methods, and specific issues in clinical ethics, vulnerability and consent for research, and ethical issues in translational research

Marion Danis, MD

Marion Danis attended college and medical school at the University of Chicago. She trained in Internal Medicine and subsequently received an NIEHS-funded postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served on the faculty of the Division of General Medicine and Clinical Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina between 1978 and 1997. While at UNC she directed the Medical Intensive Care Unit and chaired the UNC Hospitals Ethics Committee. She has also chaired the Ethics committee of the Society of Critical Care Medicine. In 1997 she joined the Department of Bioethics in the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health where she serves as Chief of the Bioethics Consultation Service and Head of the Section on Ethics and Health Policy.

She has had a long-standing interest in patient preferences and how they are incorporated into medical practice. She has conducted studies in end-of-life decision making and on advance directives. Her work currently focuses on finding ways to balance the competing concerns of respect for patient autonomy and the need to distribute limited resources fairly. As Head of the Section on Ethics and Health Policy, she is interested in promoting scholarship that connects deliberation about ethical values with health policy.