NSHEN has developed the Bioethics Book Club as a resource for ethics committees, organizations and health care teams looking for a fun, creative, interactive way to facilitate discussion about health ethics issues and engage in ethics education.

We will select a variety of books with health ethics themes – both fiction and non-fiction – and develop a handout for each that includes a summary, some of the ethics issues addressed in the book and discussion questions.

Your group will select the book that is most relevant or of interest to you, give your group members time to read the book, and then use the discussion questions as a guide to facilitate a group discussion around the health ethics issues within each book and how they relate to your practice.

Some of these books are available in the NSHEN Lending Library and most are available through Nova Scotia’s public libraries.

Continue to check back often! Also, if you know of a book not on our list that would be a good fit for Bioethics Book Club, please let us know!

New Book Summary with Discussion Questions

August 2019

What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear, Beacon Press, 2018

Can refocusing conversations between doctors and their patients lead to better health? 
Despite modern medicine’s infatuation with high-tech gadgetry, the single most powerful diagnostic tool is the doctor-patient conversation, which can uncover the lion’s share of illnesses. However, what patients say and what doctors hear are often two vastly different things.

Patients, anxious to convey their symptoms, feel an urgency to “make their case” to their doctors. Doctors, under pressure to be efficient, multitask while patients speak and often miss the key elements. Add in stereotypes, unconscious bias, conflicting agendas, and fear of lawsuits and the risk of misdiagnosis and medical errors multiplies dangerously.

Past Summaries

Coming Soon…

  • Hunger – A memoir of (My) Body, By Roxane Gay