Blog: A Bioethicist in Paris

Dr Trevor Stammers, Programme Director in Bioethics and Medical Law at St Mary’s recently attended the third Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education in Paris. Here is his account of the trip. Towards the end of June, I had the opportunity of travelling to Paris and attending the third Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education, facilitated annually by Cambridge University Press and held at Reid Hall, the delightful Columbia University Centre in Paris. At its heart the consortium recognises that, although as bioethicists we represent a variety of disciplines, there are certain truths we hold in common: First, that the future of our discipline rests on the foundation of bioethics education. Secondly, ensuring the strength of this foundation requires a bold exploration of where we are now and what future directions should be pursued. The focus of this third consortium was on "how to" methods of teaching bioethics. Around 60 academics in bioethics education, drawn mainly from the US and Europe but also this year from as far afield as Australia and Uruguay, gathered for three days of short presentations from over 34 speakers with discussion and debate. I greatly enjoyed last year’s conference but this year I enjoyed it even more, since I knew the format and was able to renew friendships made the previous year, especially with Dr Thomasine Kushner from the Cambridge Quarterly, whose self-effacing efficiency ensured the whole event ran smoothly. This year, breakfast and lunch were provided on site enabling further networking over meals. The wondrous delights of nearby Rotunde restaurant were also sampled, but only once this year! The morning of the first day was given over to examining virtues in medical ethics teaching. Dr Paquita de Zulueta's presentation on teaching compassionate resilience was especially interesting for UK delegates in the wake of the Francis Report on the Mid-Staffordshire hospital scandal. That afternoon in the session on new approaches to bioethics education, it was a special delight to hear one of our MA graduates, Dr Chris Willmott, give a scintillating presentation on using multi-media in bioethics teaching and demonstrating his own innovation - the Biobytes website, which I will certainly be including in the list of programme resources for this forthcoming academic year. The next morning session comprised four sessions on using film and arts in bioethics teaching, a highly relevant issue for St Mary's as the MA programme migrates this year to the new Arts and Humanities School here. It was during this session that I presented a short paper on Edinburgh Bioethics Film Festival: A Model for Cloning?, which explored this annual event, now in its ninth year, as a paradigm for engaging with the public in bioethical debate. This was followed by sessions on multidisciplinary group teaching and, following lunch, on outcome measures and standards of training. The latter session got perhaps rather over-intensively embroiled in a debate between US delegates about current local controversies in regulation and assessment, which left those outside of the US context rather bemused. The first session of the final day of the conference was on curriculum development and methodology and contained at least from my point of view, two of the most novel and interesting talks of the whole conference. Prof Ken Kipnis from Hawaii University talked about teaching medical and nursing ethics in a multicultural setting and used Samoan reverence for the paterfamilias as a gripping case study. Alistair Campbell, Prof of Medical Ethics at the National University of Singapore, then gave an instructive account of the practicalities of teaching ethics to large groups of students in their hundreds. I left the conference as last year, with a lot of new ideas, happy memories of a very congenial time with colleagues across the world and, most of all, the feeling that the future of teaching bioethics was a bright one. There are many problems, both in terms of resources – human and financial, quality assurance and assessment to mention just three, but this annual event leaves me better equipped to meet these challenges personally and reassures me that there are any many others too working towards the same goal of excellence in bioethics education.