Walking Towards Suffering with Integrity:
Cultivating Moral Resilience in a Culture of Ethical Practice
November 13, 2019, 9:30 am – 4 pm
With Cynda Rushton, PhD, RN, FAAN
This program is a collaboration with the Spiritual and Religious Care Department, The Mindfulness Project, and the Bioethics Department at SickKids Hospital
The prevalence of moral distress and its relationship to burnout create urgency in finding ways to address it. Commonplace in clinical practice, moral distress is the anguished experienced in response to a situation that compromises our integrity. The prolonged consequences can result in erosion of our physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual well-being. The solutions we discover will require alignment of both individual and system focused strategies aimed at fostering moral resilience and a culture of ethical practice.
This experiential workshop will explore the contours of moral distress in clinical practice, by examining the emerging concept of moral resilience, and by applying a methodology for creating meaningful systemic results. Using individual skills in mindful awareness, participants will explore their moral suffering and learn ways to foster their moral resilience by cultivating new neuropathways, restoring integrity, and fostering ethical competence and self-stewardship. With this foundation we will focus on applying a conscious full spectrum model in creating a culture of ethical practice and in designing system approaches to address the root causes of moral distress in clinical practice.
Fee:
$185 General Admission
$135 SickKids Employees
Location:
Peter Gilgan Learning and Research Centre: The Gallery, (2nd Floor) 686 Bay St.
Program Details:
Registration and refreshments 9:30 am
Morning session 10 – 12:30 noon
Lunch 12:30-1:45 pm
Afternoon Session 1:45-4 pm
(Schedule subject to change)
With Cynda Rushton, PhD, RN, FAAN
“There’s a whole body of work that is around helping people to be a little more compassionate toward themselves and their limits, and also to help people to remember why they are doing the work that they are doing. In the midst of the distress, we often become so alienated from “Why am I doing this work in the first place” that we get focused on making other people do things that we think are the right actions. We miss why we are really here. That’s a really important element of being able to move forward. People are hungry for this. Many people have stories after stories that have accumulated for years. Their backpacks are really full and really heavy. We need to now help them let go of all of that so that they can reorient back to why they decided to be a nurse or a doctor in the first place.”
Cynda Rushton is a clinician, educator, researcher and advocate for compassionate health care with over 35 years of nursing experience, Dr. Rushton’s work focuses on clinical ethics, palliative and end-of-life care, particularly for children, as well as integrated organizational change and ethical leadership. She has led numerous initiatives to cultivate contemplative practices that foster awareness, inquiry and resilience in complex health care settings and to address the detrimental effects of moral distress on clinicians, patients and families. She designed, implemented and evaluated the Mindful Ethical Practice & Resilience Academy (MEPRA) for nurses. She has published over 160 articles and book chapters on related topics. (Dr. Cynda Rushton is the Anne and George L. Bunting Professor of Clinical Ethics and Professor of Nursing and Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University Berman Institute of Bioethics and Schools of Nursing & Medicine. She is the Co-Chair of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Ethics Committee and Consultation Service.)
Since 2001 she has served as a teacher and collaborator in Upaya‘s Being With Dying Professional Training program and as core faculty in G.R.A.C.E. Along with Roshi Joan Halifax and Al Kaszniak, she has collaborated in the development of a framework and strategies for addressing moral distress and understanding the process of moral discernment. Currently her research focuses on the cultivation of moral resilience in response to adversity created by ethical conflicts and designing a culture that fosters ethical practice. Her forthcoming edited book, “Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Healthcare” will be published by Oxford University Press.