Is this all a good idea or a bad idea? We regularly use live webcasts as teaching tools. The most notable one is a worldwide CME course offered by Doctors Ram Chuttani and Doug Pleskow and others, in which they present two days' worth of endoscopies in real time. This kind of course is extremely valuable to doctors and nurses.
But broadcasting live to the public raises ethical concerns, particularly if and when things go wrong. Read these excerpts as to how MUH handles things and see if you share Mr. Morreim's view.
Mr. Ferris said: “One concern is what happens if something goes wrong — you’re making this public in a very real-time way. Our general plan is we would gently take a break from the twittering if the situation became very dire. You don’t necessarily want to be tweeting that somebody might be dying on the table, and God forbid the patient’s family learns about it that way.”
Methodist Hospital records an identical surgery on another patient, so if “something unforeseen happens and you need the camera to cut away from the surgery, you can fall back on your previous surgery,” Ms. Fazakerly said.
E. Haavi Morreim, an ethicist at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, said “If you don’t show the bad along with the good, people can end up misinformed or with excessively optimistic expectations.”
