WVNEC Noon Webinars
Event Cost: FREE
Eat your lunch and use the time productively! Get practice in analyzing and challenging ethical issues common in patient care.
There is no registration fee for this series. To participate on any of the webinars in this series, click on the registration button at the bottom of the page on the day of the webinar you wish to attend and follow the instructions to access the webinar.
Course Description:
Welcome to the 2026–2027 WVNEC Webinar Series, brought to you in collaboration with the Charleston Area Medical Center’s Geriatrics Lunch and Learn Program. Continuing education credits for this series are available and free through a generous grant from the CAMC Foundation.
Designed for clinicians, nurses, social workers, ethics committee members, health care and elder law attorneys, and health care administrators, this series explores four of the most complex and pressing ethical dilemmas encountered in contemporary clinical practice. Through case-based discussions, real-world applications, and relevant health law considerations, participants will gain practical tools to navigate patient-family-clinician relational breakdowns, conflicts between the health care surrogate and the patient’s advance directive, critical decisions for patients with limited capacity who refuse treatment, and the application of advance directives to critical life-threatening situations.
2026–2027 Series Topics:
- Avoiding a Crisis: Being Prepared When Advance Care Planning Documents Conflict with the Surrogate’s Decisions — Resolving conflict when the health care surrogate requests treatment contrary to the patient’s living will instructions.
- Navigating Medical Decision-Making After a “Rupture of Trust” — Re-establishing constructive communication with the family and shared decision-making when the family no longer trusts the health care team.
- Refusal, Capacity, and Care: The Ethics of Overriding Patient Treatment Decisions — Balancing patient autonomy against beneficence and nonmaleficence when evaluating decision-making capacity in a patient who refuses critical treatment and wants to be discharged against medical advice.
- Paper vs. Patient: When Advance Directives Clash with Clinical Reality — Interpreting how to apply prior expressed wishes for life-sustaining treatment in an advance directive of a patient who is imminently dying.
Webinar Dates:
August 26, 2026 - Avoiding a Crisis: Being Prepared When Advance Care Planning Documents Conflict with the Surrogate’s Decisions
November 18, 2026 - Refusal, Capacity, and Care: The Ethics of Overriding Patient Treatment Decisions
February 24, 2027 - Paper vs. Patient: When Advance Directives Clash with Clinical Reality
April 28, 2027 - Navigating Medical Decision-Making After a “Rupture of Trust”
Target Audience:
This series is appropriate for physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, social workers, psychologists, chaplains, attorneys, ethics committee members, and health care administrators seeking to deepen their understanding of clinical ethics, ethics consultation, and health care law.
Overall Learning Objectives:
At the conclusion of this webinar series, participants should be able to:
- Analyze and Apply Ethical Principles: Identify and evaluate competing ethical principles (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice) in complex clinical ethics consultation scenarios.
- Resolve Communication Conflicts and Rebuild Trust: Apply structured approaches for clinicians and ethics consultants to restore relationships with families hoping for a miracle in critically ill patients when there has been a loss of trust.
- Assess Capacity and Its Role in Decision-Making: Determine the ethical and legal boundaries for overriding treatment refusals in patients with limited decision-making capacity.
- Apply West Virginia Health care Law: Cite and apply relevant West Virginia health care law governing advance directives, surrogate authority, decision-making capacity, informed consent, and patient rights in clinical practice.