Suzanne Metselaar

The CURA project: the participatory development, evaluation and implementation of a clinical ethics support instrument for caregivers in palliative care

Suzanne Metselaar, PhD
Assistant Professor Medical Ethics, Ethicist
Department of Ethics, Law and Humanities
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, Netherlands

This conference is organized by Éric Racine. It is part of the 2021-2022 IRCM conference calendar. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference series will be presented on Zoom.

Zoom Link : https://zoom.us/j/94472030139
ID : 944 7203 0139
Code : 462063

About the conference:
How can caregivers in palliative care be supported in dealing with their moral dilemmas in daily practice? How can their moral resilience and moral competences be fostered? Over the last four years, my research projects have revolved around these research questions. In order to answer them, my colleagues and I have taken a participatory approach: we have developed, evaluated, and are now widely implementing a clinical ethics support (CES) instrument called CURA together with caregivers and other stakeholders. This approach to research is in line with the general approach of our department to clinical ethics: fostering methodically structured dialogues among stakeholders in order to reach shared normative conclusions, in which the ethicist takes on the role as a facilitator of the joint reflection process.
In my lecture, I will go into this specific approach to CES and how this translates into research, taking the CURA project as an example. Furthermore, I will go into CURA as a low-threshold instrument that is designed to be used by caregivers themselves in their daily practice. 'CURA' is also an acronym for the four steps of the reflection it prescribes: 1) Concentrate, 2) Unrush, 3) Reflect, and 4) Act.

About Suzanne Metselaar:
Dr. Metselaar is an assistant professor of Ethics and Medical Philosophy at the Department of Ethics, Law & Humanities of the Amsterdam University Medical Centers, Amsterdam. There, she coordinates the program ‘Ethics of Aging & End of Life’. Her research projects focus on the ethics of elderly, palliative and end-of-life care, as well as on how to foster the (moral) resilience of caregivers. Having a PhD in philosophy, she is also interested in the philosophical principles of clinical ethics. Especially, she publishes on Moral Case Deliberation (an approach to clinical ethics support) and its foundations in philosophical pragmatism, dialogical ethics and hermeneutics. As a clinical ethicist, she provides ethics support to a wide variety of health care professionals and institutions. She is Vice-chair the Medical Ethics Committee of Amsterdam UMC.