Online lecture of Prof. Michelle Mullen
Title: Paediatrics Palliative Care & Bioethics: navigating theory and praxis?
Presenter: Dr. Michelle Mullen Associate Professor of Paediatrics University of Ottawa, Canada. Consultant Bioethicist and Head of Service, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO)
Date: 28 October 2025 at 16:00 CET
The lecture will be held on the MS Teams
The lecture is organised and conducted by Marta Szabat (PhD), adjunct at the Chair of Bioethics and Health Psychology, Faculty of Health Sciences, Jagiellonian University Medical College
Synopsis:
The ethics of paediatric palliative care raise some of the most difficult and contested considerations. These include crucial and sometimes elusive concepts of quality of life, best interests, ‘treatments’, and who decides. The successes of interventions in congenital conditions, cancer and trauma mean that more children may face the prospect of dying beyond earliest childhood. In the Canadian context, the tensions saturate the spectrum of possibilities and include questions of whether, for example, a baby born with Trisomy 18 should have corrective heart surgery, and, whether medical assistance in dying should be made available to children. The most commonly invoked bioethics tools can appear to offer little to address these challenges.
Using a case-based approach, this lecture will review the ethics “toolkit” for these deliberations, and introduce more recent ethical modalities which can help inform our deliberations.
Objectives:
- To review and critique contemporary western approaches to bioethics in the paediatric palliative care context
- To elaborate the bioethics “toolkit” by considering the role of Intersectionality and Trauma Informed Care in the context
- To apply bioethics analysis using a case-based approach
Participation is free, register here: >>>
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