The Ethics of Developing Life-Saving Technologies for Children

Implementing any new technology into healthcare involves negotiating practical, ethical, and social considerations. These include questions such as: "How is care currently given and how will this change it?"; "Why are we doing what we currently do?"; "How will this change make healthcare better, and for whom?"; "What will convince us that care is improved?" The focus of this course is to examine the ethical issues that accompany the implementation of cutting-edge technologies in today's society. We will do this through the lens of the development of care for children with cardiac disease - one of the most technologically and technically complex subfields in medicine. We will develop students' skills in asking critical questions of innovative technology because, by definition, what constitutes the "best" care choice or practice approach, and the impact on practical, ethical, and social concerns needs to be re-evaluated with every new implementation.