March 3: Health Law Scholar and Patients' Rights Activist Lori Andrews to Address Patient Safety
Lori Andrews, path-breaking bioethicist, legal activist, scholar, and author, will present the first annual Cathy Shine Lecture, Thursday, March 3, at Boston University School of Public Health.
The lecture will be held at noon in Room L-110 of the Boston University School of Medicine Instructional Building on the Boston University Medical Campus, 72 East Concord St. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a reception.
Andrews’ lecture, “Studying Medical Malpractice at the Bedside,” draws on her own research, which heavily influenced the 1999 Institute of Medicine malpractice/patient safety study “To Err is Human.” She will address a series of crucial questions: What causes medical errors in hospitals? How do physicians, nurses, administrators and patients respond when an error occurs? Can studies of medical errors provide the foundation for changes to improve patient safety? To begin to answer these questions she led a team of researchers who followed surgical attendings and residents on rounds; sat in on nurse shift changes; and attended morbidity and mortality meetings and legal discussions to determine the incidence and causes of medical errors in a teaching hospital.
The event inaugurates the Cathy Shine Lectureship, established in 2010 at BUSPH with a gift from the family of the late Cathy Shine to advance the human rights of patients and those in need of medical care. The lectureship is organized by the school’s Department of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights.
“It’s a tribute to Cathy and her experiences that Lori Andrews has agreed to present the first Cathy Shine Lecture,” said George Annas, chair and William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights. “Lori is one of those very rare health law professionals who not only cares about patients, but has also had a major impact on changing the legal rules to better protect them,” he said. Her influence has been felt not only in the hospital and clinic, but also in all aspects of assisted reproduction, the emerging field of reprogentics, as well as challenging current rules for gene banking and patenting.
Andrews is Distinguished Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law; an associate vice president of Illinois Institute of Technology; and the director of IIT’s Institute for Science, Law and Technology.
She was elected chair of the ELSI (ethical, legal and social implications) Working Group of the Human Genome Project in 1995, but resigned to protest the expectation that the group act more as cheerleader for the project than to provide critical thinking about emerging social policy controversies that come with the new genetics.
She is author of more than 150 articles on health care policy, biotechnology, genetics and reproductive technologies and ten non-fiction books, including Genetics: Ethics, Law and Policy (West 2002 & 2d ed. 2006); Future Perfect: Confronting Decisions About Genetics, (Columbia U. Press 2001); and her autobiographical The Clone Age: Adventures in the New World of Reproductive Technology (Henry Holt 2000). She is also the author of three medical mysteries that explore in fiction many of the issues she has studied: Sequence (2006), The Silent Assassin (2007) and Immunity (2008). She is consulting producer for a made-for-TV medical ethics drama featuring a law professor not entirely unlike her, which is currently in development at Fox under executive producer and writer Warren Leight (Law & Order: Criminal Intent, In Treatment, and Lights Out).
Cathy Shine, for whom the lectureship is named, became an advocate for patient rights after being restrained against her will at Massachusetts General Hospital while recovering from a severe asthma attack. The trauma she experienced led her to avoid hospital treatment, and she died in 1992 as a result of another asthma attack. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in a decision in her favor and against the hospital for treating her without her consent, confirmed that the law protects “the right of a competent individual to refuse [any] medical treatment.”
For more information on the Shine Lecture, visit sph.bu.edu/shine.