Ethical questions arise in all areas of our Hospital. Our faces of ethics feature highlights different roles/departments in our organization and how ethics is relevant to their work.

What do you do & how is ethics relevant to you?

I support hyperacute and acute Stroke best practice in the Regional and local hospitals of Northwestern Ontario. Geography in Northwestern Ontario makes it challenging to build systems that get patients to the right care as fast as possible. With limited regional resources, the Northwestern Ontario Regional Stroke Network team is constantly mindful of how we collaborate with system partners. Stroke treatment is extremely time sensitive and depending on recourses, weather, patient condition we are met with ethical dilemmas on how to move patients from Regional locations or communities to stroke care.

What ethical issues come up in your area?

Ensuring patients get timely stroke care can come with large transportation costs, increase cost of diagnostic work up, transporting patients away from community or family support or removal of community ambulance for long time durations. As a Regional Network, we are consistently learning from our Regional stalk holders to customize stroke care depending on resource availability, geography and occurrence of stroke.

Ethics affects us all. Anyone struggling with an ethics question can contact the Bioethicist for support or access decision-making resources on the intranet.

Bioethicist: Michelle Allain – allainm@tbh.net, Ext. 6538