Susan Kashaf, MD, MPH

Professional Responsibility examines many of the moral, legal, economic, social, and structural aspects of the health care system in which you will immerse yourself over the next several decades of your working life. What you learn in this course will have lasting importance in the coming years, as you complete your schooling and residency training, and then build your career from among your many choices, including patient care, teaching, research, administration, and leadership.

One of our most important tasks in this course will be to examine the moral and ethical context of the practice of medicine, or what society expects of us in addition to our purely technical skills – including how we comport ourselves, how well we communicate, what our obligations to our patients and communities are, and how well we live up to them. We will also be expected to recognize, confront, and resolve ethical dilemmas that arise during patient care and research, when the proper course of action – what we should do – is not immediately obvious, and there is often disagreement among well-meaning people. These disagreements are particularly likely to arise at the time of critical life events – pregnancy, childbirth, life-threatening illness, and the dying process.

Professional Responsibility will also examine the social and economic contexts in which the profession operates, including how the health care system is (or is not) organized and paid for, how the health professions are governed, and what the law has to say about health care and its practitioners. And we will examine the range of possible effects of the current turmoil in our federal government on the health care system.