Greenwall Foundation Making a Difference Grants
Congratulations to Drs. Crystal Brown, assistant professor (Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine) and Dr. Thomas Gallagher, professor (General Internal Medicine) and associate chair, who have received funding from the Greenwall Foundation.
Projects
Restorative Processes for Medical Racism: Fostering Accountability and Relational Repair
Dr. Brown’s project is “Restorative Processes for Medical Racism: Fostering Accountability and Relational Repair.”
This study aims to assess whether and how processes based on restorative justice should be implemented in healthcare settings in response to medical racism.
Dr. Brown and the research team will use surveys and interviews to understand the perspectives of patients and healthcare workers on potential benefits and risks of restorative circles.
The team will pilot restorative circles and gain feedback from participants through interviews on intended and unintended consequences of the circles.
They will use this data to inform normative analyses of whether and how broader implementation in healthcare should be considered.
Communication and Resolution Programs: Tackling the Critical Unanswered Ethical Questions
Dr. Gallagher’s project is “Communication and Resolution Programs: Tackling the Critical Unanswered Ethical Questions.”
Communication and Resolution Programs (CRPs) respond to harm events in healthcare with transparency and accountability. While CRPs are a best practice, a challenge remains: inconsistent adoption, which increases suffering and diminishes quality.
Experts in CRPs, ethics, patient safety, and health law will answer 7 ethics questions that are impairing CRPs.
Dr. Gallagher and the research team will assess CRP implementation by reviewing 40 cases, and then conduct 24 interviews and 6 focus groups with key stakeholders that explore values tradeoffs. A normative analysis will seek to determine solutions to be implemented in a national CRP learning community.
The Greenwall Foundation’s bioethics grants program, Making a Difference in Real-World Bioethics Dilemmas, supports research to help resolve important emerging or unanswered bioethics problems in clinical, biomedical, or public health decision-making, policy, or practice.