In part 1 of our post about ethics support at Nova Scotia Health, you learned about the structure for ethics support and the types of support available to staff and physicians. Now, in part 2, we will cover how you access ethics support through Ethics Nova Scotia Health.
Ethics support is available to all staff, health care providers, volunteers, patients, and families at Nova Scotia Health. Our hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30 -4:30pm.
To request ethics support:
- Visit our corporate website.
- On the website, click on the appropriate link to access a request form. Download the form and fill it in.
- Submit the completed form by email to the relevant zone ethics contact.
OR
- Call the ethics contact in your zone.
What to expect when you request an ethics consultation
Ethics requests are confidential. Health care team members, patients, and families do not need permission from the treating physician to request an ethics consultation.
Once you have submitted your request, an ethics administrator or a member of the ethics consultation team will contact you. If you have not filled in a request form, you may be asked to provide more information about the situation. We will then triage your request. If we determine that another service may be better able to address the issue, we will do our best to direct you to the relevant service.
Ethics consultation support can take different forms, depending on the issue and the situation:
- In some cases, an informal conversation with a health care ethicist may help clarify the ethical concerns and the tensions between values.
- In other cases, it may be useful to involve several team members in a meeting (online or in-person) with Ethics, to discuss the team's concerns.
- You may choose to involve Ethics in a more formal meeting with the medical team, patients, and family members.
During your ethics consultation, we can help you:
- Work through complex decisions
- Identify tensions between the values in the situation
- Explore possible options and the consequences of those options
NOTE Ethics does not take over the decision-making authority.
Online ethics resources and tools
Ethics Nova Scotia Health resources: https://www.cdha.nshealth.ca/ethics-support/ethics-resources
Nova Scotia Health Ethics Network (NSHEN): www.nshen.ca
Clinical ethics resources:
- Ethics Nova Scotia Health Tool: An approach to working through ethical questions is for all health care providers, employees, and volunteers. It can help you work through ethical questions to identify the tension between principles and values, and consider your options.
- Patient and Family Ethics Tool: Help with Ethical Issues guides patients and families through ethical issues in patient care. The tool is available on our public website in English, French, Arabic, and Chinese.
Resources for health policy developers and reviewers:
- Ethics and Health Policy: The Nuts & Bolts is a general guide on developing health policies. It guides you through the various stages of health policy development. NOTE This guide is written for a general audience. It does not speak to the specifics of Nova Scotia Health's policy development and approval processes.
Ethics education resources:
- What is Informed Choice? is a two-page guide that summarizes the five components of informed choice. The guide is available in English and in French. The online version is a subject guide and includes a short video.
- NSHEN's Fireside Chats is a video series featuring interviews with health care providers about ethical issues in health care. The videos are between 20 and 30 minutes long, and include discussion questions. The two latest videos focus on Ethical Challenges in Substitute Decision Making (from a family member perspective) and Ethical Challenges Around Substitute Decision Making in Clinical Practice.
- NSHEN's It's Complicated: A Podcast about Healthcare Ethics in Practice discusses the latest health care ethics issues with guest speakers. The most recent episode, Conversation on Moral Wellness in Healthcare Ethics, features an interview with Dr. Allen Alvarez in conversation with NSHEN’s network ethicist, Marika Warren. You can listen to the podcast episode on the NSHEN website: www.nshen.ca/index.php/podcast/conversation-on-moral-wellness-in-healthcare-ethics/. You can also find it on Spotify®, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.
If you have any general inquiries about Ethics Nova Scotia Health, please contact czethics@nshealth.ca. To request ethics support, please reach out to Ethics Support for your health zone: https://www.cdha.nshealth.ca/ethics-support/contact.
Lisbeth Witthoefft Nielsen
Ethics Resource Coordinator, Ethics Nova Scotia Health, Central Zone
with the Ethics Collaborations Team
Department of Bioethics, Dalhousie University
In our previous Copyright Corner post, we discussed the importance of citation and promised to address copyright attribution. This post might have left you wondering....
Citation and attribution are closely related terms, often used interchangeably. In fact, academic citation is a form of attribution, used to acknowledge the author(s) of a work from which you have quoted or paraphrased a small amount of content.
But you may have to provide attribution to an author or copyright owner in a different (or additional) way if:
Open licenses
Copyright owners can apply open licenses to their work to give permission to use or adapt as the license specifies. Open licenses may be used for any type of resource, including:
The best-known open licensing system is Creative Commons, which we have discussed in a previous blog post. The minimum requirement of each of the six types of licenses is attribution.
Attribution statements for open-licensed resources should include the title of the work, the name of the author/creator, and the license type, with hyperlinks to each where applicable (Aesoph, n.d.).
Note that although there is no legal requirement to give attribution to the author(s) of a Public Domain or CC0-dedicated resource, it is good practice to do so. Not only does this acknowledge someone else's work, it also tells your readers where to find the original (Kat, 2015).
You can find examples of Creative Commons attribution styles on their Best practices for attribution page. Also useful is Open Washington’s Open Attribution Builder, which allows you to enter information about a resource to generate an attribution statement.
Terms of use
Sometimes, the creators of a website or other resource will explicitly tell you how to attribute their content. Look for language such as:
in the fine print at the bottom/footer of webpages.
These terms should be interpreted as a legal agreement between you and the copyright owner (ContractsCounsel, nd.). Failure to comply could lead to a take-down request or even legal action against you or your employer.
For example, the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) (n.d.) specifies:
Permission
When you request permission to use a copyright-protected resource, the copyright owner may say yes on the condition that you provide attribution in a specific way. Sometimes, they will just ask you to provide a citation, but quite often they will require you to use attribution terminology such as:
We will discuss the permissions process in depth in the next Copyright Corner post. For now, when you request permission, it is always a good idea to ask the copyright owner if they have any conditions for how the work can be used, including how it should be attributed.
A few things to note
The differences between citation and attribution are subtle. Here are some things to keep in mind:
You can read more about this and other copyright topics in our Copyright subject guide. If you have questions, you can book a consultation with a library team member or email us at copyright@nshealth.ca.
Attribution
Some information is adapted from Self-Publishing Guide by L.M. Aesoph, published by BCcampus Open Education and used under the conditions of a CC BY 4.0 International License.
References
1. Aesoph, L.M. (n.d.). Self-Publishing Guide. BCcampus Open Education. https://opentextbc.ca/selfpublishguide/
2. Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN). (2022, July 1). Copyright and attribution. https://aurin.org.au/legal/copyright-and-attribution/
3. ContractsCounsel (n.d.). Website terms and conditions. https://www.contractscounsel.com/t/us/website-terms-and-conditions
4. Kat (2015, February 25). Why Creative Commons uses CC0 [blog post]. Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/2015/02/25/why-creative-commons-uses-cc0/
Roxanne MacMillan
Librarian Educator
Central Zone
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