Ethic Bowl 2020: Promoting Deliberation and Ethical Practice in Healthcare

The physician assistant team, the 2020 Ethics Bowl Spirit Award winners.

The College of Health Care Sciences hosted the 16th annual Ethics Bowl Competition on Thursday, February 27, 2020.  This annual interprofessional experience brings students together from different health care professions to engage in thoughtful deliberation about current ethical issues in healthcare.

Seventy-four students, faculty coaches, faculty judges, and staff moderators participating from the following professions:

  • Physician Assistant
  • Occupational Therapy
  • Physical Therapy
  • Anesthesiology Assistant
  • Nursing Ft Lauderdale
  • Pharmacy
  • Nursing Palm Beach
  • Medical Sonography

Teams practiced together for many weeks with the hopes of winning the Ethics Bowl trophy. It was a close competition, but the Nursing team from the Palm Beach campus won the final round and took home the gold medals. Physical Therapy earned silver medals this year and the Physician Assistant program rocked the house with a large and boisterous group of faculty and students adorned in costumes waving homemade signs.

The practice of ethics is the systematic, reasoned deliberation regarding values and the appropriateness of choices that are made in the ever-changing circumstances of personal and organizational life. Health care ethics specifically focuses on matters of health, life and death that arise from the complex relationships among medicine, science, technology, and society.  Some of the cases the student teams considered involved the opioid epidemic, organ donation, and a young girl with AIDS.