Reinforcing medical authority: clinical ethics consultation and the resolution of conflicts in treatment decisions

Despite substantial efforts in the past 15 years to professionalise the field of clinical ethics consultation, sociologists have not re‐examined past hypotheses about the role of such services in medical decision‐making and their effect on physician authority. In relation to those hypotheses, we explore two questions: (i) What kinds of issues does ethics consultation resolve? and (ii) what is the nature of the resolution afforded by these consults? We examined ethics consultation records created between 2011 and mid‐2015 at a large tertiary care US hospital and found that in most cases, the problems addressed are not novel ethical dilemmas as classically conceived, but are instead disagreements between clinicians and patients or their surrogates about treatment. The resolution offered by a typical ethics consultation involves strategies to improve communication rather than the parsing of ethical obligations. In cases where disagreements persist, the proposed solution is most often based on technical clinical judgements, reinforcing the role of physician authority in patient care and the ethical decisions made about that care.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154312/1/shil13003.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154312/2/shil13003_am.pd

Learning to manage uncertainty: supervision, trust and autonomy in residency training

Sociologists have debated whether and how medical trainees are socialised to deal with uncertainty for decades. Recent changes in the structure of medical education, however, have likely affected the ways that resident physicians learn to manage uncertainty. Through ethnographic case studies of academic medical centres in Switzerland and the United States, this article provides new insights into the processes through which residents learnt to manage uncertainty. These processes included working under supervision, developing relationships of trust with supervisors and gaining autonomy to practise independently. As a result, residents developed different attitudes towards uncertainty. Residents at the Swiss medical centre tended to develop a more pragmatic attitude and viewed uncertainty as something to be addressed and controlled. On the other hand, residents at the American medical centre tended to develop an acceptive attitude towards uncertainty. More broadly, residents learnt to reproduce their supervisors' attitudes towards uncertainty. This article therefore provides new perspectives on continuity and the reproduction of social phenomena in medical education