The Family Health Care Decisions Act and Clinical Ethics Consultation in New York: Perspectives and Experiences One Year In

Date: June 20, 2011
Time: 4:00 PM - 8:00 PM

The Family Health Care Decisions Act (“FHCDA”) fills a longstanding gap in New York law by providing a framework for surrogate decision-making for incapacitated patients where there is no healthcare proxy and the patient’s prior wishes are unknown. Join leading area policymakers and bioethicists for a discussion of the law its impact on decision-making and bioethics consultation in the first year since its passage.

Introductions and Moderator: 

Tia Powell, MD
Director
Montefiore-Einstein Center for Bioethics

Speakers:

Robert N. Swidler, JD
General Counsel
Northeast Health

Hannah Lipman, MD
Associate Director
Montefiore-Einstein Center for Bioethics

Jeffrey T. Berger, MD, FACP
Associate Professor of Medicine
Stony Brook University School of Medicine
Director of Clinical Ethics, Department of Medicine, and Chief, Section of Hospice and Palliative Medicine
Winthrop-University Hospital, Mineola, New York

For more information please contact ethicsnetwork@nyam.org.

About the Speaker(s)

Jeffrey T. Berger, MD is the Director of Clinical Ethics and Chief of the Section of Hospice and Palliative Medicine at Winthrop University Hospital, Associate Professor of Medicine at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, and a senior fellow in the Stony Brook Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics. He currently serves on the American College of Physicians’ Committee on Ethics Professionalism and Human Rights, is chairman of the Committee on Bioethical Issues of the Medical Society of the State of New York, is a member of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs Committee of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and is a member of the New York State Palliative Care Education and Training Council. His particular interests are in multi-cultural bioethics, end-of-life ethics and the ethics of human subjects research. His recent work has focused on surrogate decision making and patients’ concerns for family burden.

Hannah I. Lipman, MD, MS is Associate Director of the Montefiore-Einstein Center for Bioethics, Chief of the Bioethics Consultation Service, and Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Divisions of Geriatrics and Cardiology. The Bioethics Consultation Service is a multidisciplinary team of professionals who help health care providers, patients and families resolve ethical dilemmas. She teaches bioethics to a variety of learners focusing on communication skills, conflict resolution, surrogate decision making and caring for patients without capacity who refuse treatment. She is the recipient of a HRSA-funded Geriatric Academic Career Award.

Tia Powell, MD is Director of the Montefiore-Einstein Center for Bioethics, the Certificate Program and the Masters of Science in Bioethics and is Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Clinical Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She formerly served as the Executive Director of the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, which functions as New York State's Governor-appointed bioethics commission. She founded the Ethics Consultation Service at Columbia Presbyterian. Dr. Powell has provided bioethics expertise to numerous groups. Dr. Powell is known for her work in end of life care, organ transplantation, ethics consultation and the ethics of public health disasters. Dr. Powell is board certified in Psychiatry and is a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and of The New York Academy of Medicine.

Robert N. Swidler, Esq. is General Counsel to Northeast Health, a health care system in New York's Capital Region that includes Albany Memorial Hospital, Samaritan Hospital in Troy, several primary care centers, and The Eddy, a network of long term care and residential facilities and services for seniors. Previously, Mr. Swidler was Counsel to the NYS Office of Mental Health, Assistant Counsel to Governor Mario Cuomo, and Staff Counsel to the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law. While at the Task Force, he helped develop proposals on brain death, do-not-resuscitate orders, health care proxies, organ transplantation and surrogate parenting arrangements that were later adopted as state legislation or regulations. Mr. Swidler currently is Editor of the NYS Bar Association Health Law Journal, a Governor’s appointee to NYS Task Force on Life and the Law, and the chair of the legal committee of the Health Information eXchange of New York (HIXNY). He is on the adjunct faculty of the Alden March Bioethics Center at Albany Medical College and the Union Graduate College / Mt. Sinai Bioethics Program. Mr. Swidler is the author of over 25 published articles on health law topics, and he co-authored two chapters in Legal Manual for New York Physicians. 

Registration Information
Cost: General Registration: $35.00, Ethics Network Members: $25.00, NYAM Fellows and Members: $25.00, Students and Residents: $15.00
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