Assignment
for Week Four
The assignments this week
are similar to last week’s assignments.
You will stay in the same small groups and this week you will discuss
and submit reports on three different case studies. During the first
half of the week your group will discuss two case studies and submit
a Group Report on each one, and in the second half of the week you
will discuss and submit a report on a third case.
Here are the details:
Reading:
In Freeman and McDonnell's Tough
Decisions read:
- chapter 14
(pp 149-54) "The Harrisons' Plan"
- chapter 15 (pp
155-62), "The Smyth Saga"
- chapter 6 (pp
49-57), "Wanda"
- In addition this week,
please also look through the most recent iteration of the AMA's
Principles of Medical Ethics, and the American Nursing
Association's (ANA) Code
of Ethics for Nurses. Both of these are accessible from
the Codes
page on
our class website. You should be aware of the major provisions
in these codes because they may
be relevant
to the cases you discuss this week. In addition, though no official
national "Patients' Bill of Rights" has yet been enacted
by the US Congress, a quick search on the web will show you that
there has been an awful
lot of discussion about it. That may also be relevant to your
discussions this week.
Writing:
Please complete
your reading of chapters 14 and
15 by Thursday or Friday. Your assignment
is to discuss these two cases on Thursday,
Friday and Saturday. Then on Sunday your
group will submit a report of its decisions
on each of the two cases, along with your
reasons for those decisions.
Your reading of chapter
six should be completed by
Sunday or Monday. You will discuss
the case of Wanda on Monday and Tuesday
and post your group's report by Tuesday
evening. Wednesday will be for discussing
the reports.
So again, each of the groups
will be discussing the same cases, but
whether they will come to the same or different decisions we don't
yet know.
And again
this week your discussions will take place
in your same small groups using your Group folder. After
discussing each case thoroughly, you will
issue a group report describing what your group's decision
is, and
then post it into the Whole Class Group
folder. Again, decisions
about how
that
group report will
be written,
who will compose
it, what it should say, etc, will be left
to your own group. At a minimum, the report should tell us what you
(as the
decision-making character in the story)
have decided to do, and what your reasons are for choosing to do
that.
Again, everyone
in class will be able to read (if
they want to, it's not required) any or
all of the other groups' discussions, but
please post messages
only into your own group, and to the Whole
Class Group.
This week is still a little
light on the required reading (unlike some
coming weeks), so you might take advantage of the time to get your
research
project
approved. Details of the research
project assignment can be found here.
Your
project needs to get approved by Tuesday Oct 25th at the
latest. It could well take several days or a week of back and forth emails between
us before your
project gets approved, so you'll want to start the process at least a week before that due date. Note the fairly serious
grade
penalties
for late approvals. (The usual standard is that you can expect profs to respond to emails within 24-36 hours; I try to respond sooner than that but am not always able to.)