The Joint
Commission requires that hospitals explicitly identify processes for resolving
conflicts in health care organizations. Additionally, the field of bioethics
now endorses Bioethics Mediation as a core competency for ethics consultants.
This
training provides basic
skills for addressing conflict throughout healthcare, and is appropriate for
administrators, physicians, nurses, ethics committee members, in-house legal
counsel, health lawyers, chaplains, social workers, patient advocates, risk
managers, security staff and others.
Conflict in health care is inevitable and often destructive.
Teams with diverse training collaborate to care for patients whose needs and goals vary
widely. The Joint Commission finds that communication problems underlie at
least 70% of sentinel events, and now requires all health care organizations to
have processes for addressing conflict. Conflict in the clinical setting can
cause adverse outcomes, patient dissatisfaction, provider burnout and moral
distress.
Conflict Resolution Training provides
distinctive skills for these difficult conversations by assisting people in
conflict to listen carefully, define the problem(s), identify underlying
interests, problem-solve creatively, and ultimately forge a resolution that
makes sense for everyone. Well-developed conflict resolution skills can often
transform a festering problem everyone avoids, into an opportunity to enhance
future communication, improve quality of care and increase satisfaction for
patients, families, and care providers alike.
Conflict resolution training thus enables
professionals who work in the clinical setting—administration, ethics committee
members, physicians, nurses, legal counsel, chaplains, social workers, patient
advocates, risk managers, security staff and others—to assist in difficult
situations with approaches ranging from informal conversations to serving as in-house
"neutrals" for particularly contentious conflicts.
Additionally, Bioethics Mediation is now
recognized as an essential skill for ethics consultants. Rarely do requests for
an "ethics consult" involve genuine moral puzzlement about what is
the right thing to do. Far more commonly, strongly held but deeply divergent
views about what is right are in collision. A respectful conflict resolution
process, in which each person has the opportunity to be heard and understood,
can often enable disputants to have the respectful, problem-solving
conversation that finds common ground leading to a mutually acceptable plan of
action. The mediator does not provide the answers; rather the people in
conflict do.
This training emphasizes learn-by-doing.
The instructors—experienced professional mediators who also are highly familiar
with health care's clinical realities—initially familiarize participants with
the "mediator's toolbox" of skills essential to conflict resolution,
then integrate those skills into a variety of simulation exercises. Across
these exercises, each participant will serve sometimes as mediator and
sometimes as disputant. All scenarios are based on real cases in health care,
and each practice is followed by in-depth debriefing with extensive feedback to
participants. Each scenario specifically highlights one or more of the
distinctive challenges that arise for conflict resolution in health care,
including: establishing the mediator's impartiality and credibility; cultural
issues; confidentiality of mediation in the clinical setting; determining who
belongs at the table; and other issues pivotal to successful resolution.
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