Social media use and paediatric practice: Hippocratic help, hype or harm?

Social media is increasingly a part of our personal and professional life and is here to stay. Here, I reflect on issues surrounding the use of social media (SMU) in the digital health context by clinicians in Australian paediatric health care. I aim to briefly highlight some inherent multifactorial and contextual ethical considerations which mainly relate to professionalism; including boundaries, obligations to patients and families within the therapeutic alliance, and balancing the help, hype and harm of SMU in clinical practice. I conclude that digital health and SMU are ubiquitous, and can be beneficial if used circumspectly with Hippocratic principles that have been updated for the modern era and are grounded in ancient moral codes. Unfettered SMU however, without adherence to ethical and legal guidelines is problematic, and may expose patients, families and clinicians to significant risk of harm and moral vulnerability. Justifiable, explicit, consistent and regularly reviewed boundaries, both professional and personal, are ethically advisable. These should reflect, and adapt to, the rapidly evolving nature of social media as imprudent digital health and SMU without proportionate limits, may undermine still relevant Hippocratic tenets, and the primacy of doing no harm.

Towards a broader concept of wellbeing in evaluating paediatric quality of life.

Paediatric health-care professionals have a primary duty to promote the best interests of their patients. This is reiterated in article 3 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and is predicated on promoting children's health and wellbeing. However, there is ambiguity over what standard applies when evaluating whether a paediatric health-care decision supports good outcomes. Values like 'best interests', 'doing no harm' or 'quality of life' may be indeterminate or vague and clinicians may have difficulty in conceptualising what exactly constitutes 'a good life' for children. This uncertainty leads to the question: how do we best evaluate paediatric health decisions and outcomes? Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are questionnaires that aim to achieve this by attaining data on a patient's quality of life and wellbeing. While PROMs originated with adult cohorts, they have since been applied to paediatric populations. Children are vulnerable due to their interdependency; and this raises ethical tensions regarding the potential benefits of such data, respect for autonomy and assent/consent of the individual child in clinical settings. These inherent tensions should be balanced by realising a collective good for children. PROMs should be a robust data collection source that facilitates substantive justice, both procedurally and in distributing limited health resources via accurate quality-adjusted life-years generation. This article aims to (i) overview the traditional and emerging paediatric PROMs; (ii) outline the tensions of using PROMS for children in a clinical setting and (iii) analyse the ability of traditional and emerging PROMs to promote justice in paediatric resource allocation.

The ethics of publishing in medical journals.

Ethics has been defined as the way we ought to behave. Medical publishing essentially exists to broadcast current and new medical knowledge to aid in the practice of medicine. In this review article we consider many of the aspects of medical publishing with regard to 'what we ought to do' and, equally, 'what we ought not to do' from the perspective of various ethical frameworks. Although ethics is not the law or a set of rules, nor a code of conduct, an ethical lens can be useful when developing good general guidelines for medical publishing.

Under-explored 'third dimension' of medical ethics.

In this paper, we nominally propose three dimensions of medical ethics, using the term medical ethics rather than clinical ethics to focus on the professional obligation of paediatricians in and beyond the ward and clinic. We argue there exists a duty to children along the continuum of all three dimensions. In this taxonomy, the first dimension is the obligation of paediatricians to serve the best interests of their individual patients. The second dimension involves public health aspects and communitarian concerns with a focus on utilitarian principles, such as cost-effectiveness and just resource allocation. The third dimension of medical ethics is the obligation we hold in trust to support and respect the well-being of future generations. As our ecological footprint, characterised by climate change and biodiversity collapse, will adversely affect the health of today's children and those yet unborn, paediatricians have a contemporaneous moral obligation to speak out and act as both advocates and activists.

Ethical considerations regarding the effects of climate change and planetary health on children.

Climate change represents one of the most significant health challenges and global inequities of our generation. As a 'wicked' problem, climate change imposes an involuntary exposure on vulnerable individuals and societies that is regressive in its nature, with those least responsible for destroying planetary health at greatest risk of suffering the direct and indirect health consequences of unabated warming of the planet. The current and future generations of children are the most vulnerable population to suffer the effects of climate change. By 2030, there will be 131 000 additional child deaths each year if climate mitigation strategies are not enacted, driven by the synergy of an increasing burden of infectious diseases, food insecurity and political instability. Over half a billion of the world's children live in areas vulnerable to extreme weather events, and there is a pressing risk that our current lack of action to mitigate and adapt to climate change will result in today's children, and future generations, being the first to have poorer physical and mental health than previous generations - creating a significant intergenerational ethical dilemma. Child health-care professionals need to advocate for policies to address climate change that consider the complex health, planetary and ethical considerations necessary to solve the most significant risk to our children's health today. Without immediate action, the health of the current and future generations of children is perilous.

Supporting black lives 'mattering' with flexible health care.

Black lives 'mattering' should mean intrinsically supporting feasible healthcare options for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This requires reimagining outmoded, 'neo-colonial' type models of care with implicit prejudice in hospital emergency departments (EDs). Equitably serving the needs of vulnerable cohorts like First Nations people that currently suffer most from lack of access to suitable healthcare is incumbent on government and society. To 'close the gap' for Aboriginal people, flexible treatment options should be designed with and for indigenous communities; developing models of care that will improve Aboriginal patient's attendance and completion of treatment in emergency departments. Flexiclinic, jointly developed by the Aboriginal Liaison Service and St Vincent's Hospital ED has developed such an innovative model. Since its recent inception, it has already shown enormous benefits, both in promoting equitable access and improving the health and welfare of Aboriginal patients who are receiving ongoing and quality care.

Fast and slow thinking; and the problem of conflating clinical reasoning and ethical deliberation in acute decision-making.

Expertise in a medical specialty requires countless hours of learning and practice and a combination of neural plasticity and contextual case experience resulting in advanced gestalt clinical reasoning. This holistic thinking assimilates complex segmented information and is advantageous for timely clinical decision-making in the emergency department and paediatric or neonatal intensive care units. However, the same agile reasoning that is essential acutely may be at odds with the slow deliberative thought required for ethical reasoning and weighing the probability of patient morbidity. Recent studies suggest that inadequate ethical decision-making results in increased morbidity for patients and that clinical ethics consultation may reduce the inappropriate use of life-sustaining treatment. Behavioural psychology research suggests there are two systems of thinking - fast and slow - that control our thoughts and therefore our actions. The problem for experienced clinicians is that fast thinking, which is instinctual and reflexive, is particularly vulnerable to experiential biases or assumptions. While it has significant utility for clinical reasoning when timely life and death decisions are crucial, I contend it may simultaneously undermine the deliberative slow thought required for ethical reasoning to determine appropriate therapeutic interventions that reduce future patient morbidity. Whilst health-care providers generally make excellent therapeutic choices leading to good outcomes, a type of substitutive thinking that conflates clinical reasoning and ethical deliberation in acute decision-making may impinge on therapeutic relationships, have adverse effects on patient outcomes and inflict lifelong burdens on some children and their families.

Restraint in paediatrics: A delicate balance.

Patient restraint in health care is currently under intense review. There are two disparate groups that should be considered. First, infants and young children are commonly restrained while undergoing simple medical procedures such as venepuncture or immunisation, and this practice may be better framed as 'hugging' not 'holding'. Second, there is a distinct but significant group of children and adolescents with serious psychiatric or organic illness with behavioural disturbances necessitating restraint, who are the primary focus of this paper. Nevertheless, the balance between restraining any young person in health care and causing preventable harm is delicate: any form of child restraint, whether physical, chemical or seclusion, merits ethical reflection and should be undertaken judiciously. All clinicians should prioritise the dignity and privacy of the young person while weighing the vulnerability of this cohort of patients.

Responding to the 'crowd' of voices and opinions in the paediatric clinical space: an ethics perspective.

Ready access to the internet and online sources of information about child health and disease has allowed people more 'distant' from a child, family and paediatric clinician to inform and influence clinical decisions. It has also allowed parents to share aspects of their child's health and illness to garner support or funding for treatment. As a consequence, paediatric clinicians must consider and incorporate the crowd of opinions and voices into their clinical and ethical reasoning.We identify two key ethical principles and related ethics concepts foundational to this task. We then propose a series of exploratory ethics questions to assist paediatric clinicians to engage ethically with the multiple voices in the clinical encounter while keeping the child's needs as a central focus. Using two clinical hypothetical case examples, we illustrate how our proposed ethics questions can assist paediatric clinicians to navigate the crowd in the room and bring moral reasoning to bear.We highlight a need for specific practical interactional skills training to assist clinicians to ethically respond to the crowd in the room, including to identify and weigh up the harms and benefits of endorsing or going against proposed treatments for a child, and how to discuss social media and online sources of information with parents.