Redesigning Moral Spaces

Summer–Fall 2020 — A Collaboration with Brown Alpert School of Medicine

The global pandemic provided a sudden and unique opportunity to interrogate what was clinically relevant to issues of practice in emergency medicine — i.e. how to make decisions when crisis standards of care for patients and personal safety for clinicians are not always feasible. Urgency, resource and capacity issues overwhelmed the system and in many instances the foundational principles and logics of emergency care were put aside.

Working with Jay Baruch MD and Michael Barthman MD from Brown’s Alpert School of Medicine, CfC designed a series of five Zoom-based discussions with front-line emergency care providers to explore challenges of emergency care exacerbated by COVID-19. Over the course of five sessions, CfC engaged over 100 front-line clinicians.

This work built on CfC’s ongoing interest in emergency care, a space where there is often a divide between what practitioners are trained to do and the reality of what they face in emergency rooms. In these complex spaces, clinical expertise adapts to constrained conditions: high stress, high patient volumes, high stakes; providing care to anyone at any time with any condition; caring for multiple patients often with insufficient time and imperfect information. The pandemic multiplied all of these challenges.

Redesigning Moral Spaces provided a space and a process for ED professionals to share their stories with CfC and one another and to develop a model for strategic improvement.