The Center's scholarly work includes theoretical and empirical research in bioethics, creative writing, and the publicationof SUNY Upstate's literary journal, The Healing Muse. Specific research, interests and publications can be found on the faculty web pages.
Featured research:
How do physicians make moral choices?
Developing the MERJT
Despite two decades of increasing curricular time devoted to bioethics education throughout the health professions, required ethics courses for clinical researchers, and remedial ethics programs for those found in violation of professional norms, we have no validated tools to assess the effectiveness of such efforts. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education identified professionalism as one of its key core competencies and asked training programs to assess residents in this area, but no such tools exist. More fundamentally, when a clinician has trouble coming up with a defensible action in response to an ethical issue, this may represent any of a number of difficulties, including identifying the issue, understanding the norms, applying rules to specific situations, or lacking courage to act on convictions.
Catherine Caldicott and Kathy Faber-Langendoen, with the assistance of Muriel Bebeau (educational psychologist, University of Minnesota), Stephen Thoma (educational psychologist, University of Alabama), and statisticians from Upstate's CORE, are developing a measure of ethical reasoning and judgment for physicians, residents, and medical students (known as the MERJT). Their work is funded by a $50,000 grant from the Medical Society of the State of New York. The project will result in a nuanced, validated assessment tool, specific to the medical profession, which will help educators and researchers better understand the intricacies of how professionals make moral judgments, and will ultimately lead to the development of targeted strategies to improve those abilities.
