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MetroHealth's Bioethics@Noon: "A Patient's Perspective: Care, Communication, and Compassion" featuring Andrea Hope Rubin
Details
In 2014, Andrea Hope Rubin was in a devastating car fire. As a result, she suffered a 58% total body surface area burn with 3rd and 4th degree burns to her face, head, ears, chest, back and legs. This led to a 4.5-year recovery journey, three hospital stays, 54 surgeries, and hundreds of appointments and procedures. Her experience with the medical community as a patient has been extensive. Join us as Andrea shares her story detailing what team approaches and provider interactions kept her fighting, as well as those that almost made her give up.
Learning Objectives
During this talk, the speaker will:
• Explain the importance of an interdisciplinary team approach that emphasizes cohesive messaging.
• Illustrate the value of treating a patient as a whole, not just as an immediate problem.
• Describe the impact verbal and non-verbal cues have on patients.
• Reflect on what it's like navigating the non-trauma medical community as a severely disfigured person and how medical professionals' reactions can affect their patients.
As a reminder our Center for Biomedical Ethics Grand Rounds continues to take place the first Thursday of each month from 12p-1p (with the exception of July and January). We offer these rounds via Zoom and details of each program, including the Zoom link, are shared a week prior to the program.
For more information, contact Marcie Lambrix at marcie.lambrix@case.edu
Speakers
Anita Hannig
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anita-hannig-a53078255/
Anita Hannig is associate professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, where she teaches classes on medicine, religion, gender, and death and dying. Anita’s work explores the cultural dimensions of medicine, with a particular focus on life's bookends: birth and death. In recent years, Anita has emerged as a leading voice on death literacy and education in the United States, appearing on podcasts and at community events that tackle Americans’ changing relationship with death.
Her writing has appeared in Cognoscenti, The Conversation, The Seattle Times, and Undark Magazine, among other publications. Anita has also spoken about her work in hospitals, medical schools, churches, art museums, and law schools across the country, and she has given interviews for The Washington Post, Next Avenue, USA TODAY, The Boston Globe, Mashable, Insider, and other outlets.
In 2015, Anita launched a long-term, ethnographic research project on medical aid-in-dying in the United States. This project asked how assisted dying is transforming the ways Americans die. Anita spent hundreds of hours talking with patients, families, physicians, lawmakers, and activists across the country. As part of her research, she also served as a hospice volunteer and sat in on various court cases and public hearings. Her primary mission was to move beyond a polarizing national debate by uncovering people’s real-life experiences with assisted dying laws. This research resulted in her second book, The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America (Sourcebooks, 2022).
Anita’s first major research project explored the cultural dimensions of obstetric fistula, a maternal childbirth injury that leads to chronic incontinence and affects about one million women across the Global South. Between 2008 and 2010, she studied two fistula repair and rehabilitation centers in Ethiopia. This work culminated in several journal articles and her first book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (University of Chicago Press, 2017). The book upends the classic story of cultural primitivism a lay public has been told about this birthing injury and questions the idea of heroic global medical interventions. In 2018, Beyond Surgery was awarded the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology.
Anita earned her BA in Anthropology from Reed College and her MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. She is the recipient of an array of fellowships and grants, including from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. In 2018, she received the Michael Walzer ’56 Award for Excellence in Teaching from Brandeis University, and in 2019 she was named Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor at McMaster University in Canada.
In her free time, Anita enjoys aerial arts and making jam. She loves trail running, rock climbing, and backpacking in the great outdoors, pursuits that sporadically bring her in touch with her own mortality.
Sponsors
