All child life specialists will encounter patients and families with disabilities. As with any other cultural group, child life specialists need to be prepared to provide culturally-competent care individualized to the needs of these patients and families. SUGGESTED DOMAIN: Ethics

As healthcare becomes a growing global enterprise, families are increasingly seeking care internationally. This session aims to identify the impact of culture on providers’, parents’, and children’s coping during healthcare experiences.

When caregivers decline preparation for healthcare events, child life specialists are tasked with balancing the primacy of patient and family centered care with our professional judgment rooted in evidence-based practice. We will discuss the inherent delicacy of this balance, including considerations for decision-making and specific strategies for ensuring caregivers are assisted in making safe and informed choices. Suggested Domain: Ethics

CCLS are often faced with ethical dilemmas in their daily practice. These dilemmas may arise from many different layers including the patients, families, health care team, and/or culture and society. Most who serve in health care subscribe to the Best Interest Standard, which is the "ethical requirement that people who care for others will do so in good faith, placing their assessment of that person's best interests above their own". As CCLS, navigation of Parental Authority, Pediatric Assent, Justice, and Respect for Person are common ethical principles that often arise with each intervention. However, veracity, or the obligation to be truthful may vary depending on culture. Often Eastern and Western Medicine and Culture have differing views on including children and adolescents in their health care decisions. As CCLS, who are often trained in Western Medicine, we must balance obligations to respect individual patient autonomy, professional truth telling, and tolerances of multicultural beliefs and values. This presentation will review ethical principles such as Beneficence, Nonmaleficence, Fidelity, and Cultural Relativism and how they relate to navigating ethical dilemmas, in particular with different cultural views or beliefs. For example, a CCLS may feel obligated to be honest if a patient asks, "What is happening to them?" or a CCLS may feel an obligation in Respect for a patient's autonomy to be included in decision making, memory making, or legacy building activities related to their medical diagnosis or prognosis. This presentation will provide participants an opportunity to utilize an Ethical Framework to navigate these ethical dilemmas and explore is Veracity, Always Best when working with different cultures. Suggested Domain: Ethics 1.0 PDU

Regardless of the environment, healthcare clinicians partner with patients and families during their most intimate and vulnerable experiences. Some of these interactions fall under what most would consider typical or routine, but for many, healthcare experiences are filled with unexpected procedures, language barriers, mistrust, and anxiety. In the most extreme cases, patients receive life alternating diagnoses, experience trauma, or have their assumptions and expectations challenged by disease or injury. During this presentation, participants explore and challenge traditional definitions of creativity and identify potential methods of personal self-expression for the purpose of developing resiliency. Suggested Domain: Ethics

Child Life professionals follow a code of ethical principles guided by the Association of Child Life Professionals’ mission, vision, values statements and operating principles. In our modern world, child life practice is expanding and growing every day beyond the hospital and into the community. When providing home-based and community-based child life sessions, professionals are guided by the same ethical principles as their hospital-based colleagues, but in homes and community-based settings, they face different boundary issues and challenges. This webinar explores common ethical concerns faced in home-based and community-based child life and shares insights and strategies to apply ethical principles and gain competence in navigating each situation. Participants will be able to: • identify unique insights that home sessions can provide for child life patient assessments. • identify common ethical issues and challenges that arise during home sessions. • apply appropriate personal and professional ethics when facing ethics and boundary issues during home and community sessions. • develop competence in navigating ethical situations in the home and community setting. Suggested Domain: Ethics Recording date: 2020

Exploration of the role of child life when working with LGBTQ+ youth and families. A comprehensive look at the intersection of LGBTQ+ identity, mental health, and overall healthcare experiences. Presenter will focus on developmental theory, language, cultural competency, and gender affirmative healthcare. Presenter will offer tools to anticipate and identify psychosocial stressors, developmental needs, and co-occurring mental health issues. Information on how child life can mitigate such stressors through awareness and advocacy, and help patients and families become more resilient. Finally, the webinar will discuss the importance of connection in terms of promoting health and wellness for LGBTQ+ youth and families. Suggested Domain: Ethics

In this webinar, the presenter will discuss detailed methods and interventions to engage comfortably and more frequently with individuals with autism in medical settings. Suggested Domain: Professional Responsibility, Ethics, Assessment, Intervention, DEI 1.0 PDU Airing Date: 8/7/2024

Child life specialists foster trust by communicating with children in a developmentally appropriate way throughout the treatment trajectory. Developmental theory underscores the necessity of trust for communication, yet limited research supports the facilitation of intentional conversations related to diagnosis and prognosis. This presentation will report research findings on child and parent communication preferences, which will empower child life specialists to advocate for honest developmentally appropriate information throughout a patient’s treatment.

International and national frameworks on children’s rights place children’s participation in decision-making at the top of the political agenda. The Netherlands is a country that consistently ranks particularly high on numerous international and European rankings, including rankings related to children’s rights, health, wellbeing, and happiness. In pediatric health care practice, however, children’s rights to participation in decision-making can be challenging to implement. This webinar will provide an overview of key literature currently informing children’s rights to participation in decision-making and share the findings from a focused ethnographic doctoral study exploring the perspectives of twelve child life specialists and five hospital directors on children’s participation in decision-making across two pediatric hospitals in the Netherlands in 2020-2021. Due to COVID-19, children were not interviewed. The findings provide insights into the role of power relations and paradoxical ideas related to children’s agency and rights, which can shape children’s participation in decision-making. In turn, the findings introduce children’s participation in decision-making as a complex, contextual, and relational concept. Based on the study findings, participants in this webinar will engage with more critical ways of incorporating children’s participation in decision-making in pediatric health care practice. Suggested Domain: Ethics 1.0 PDU