This tribute celebrates the life and work of Marian Gray Secundy (1938–2002), who was the first director of the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care, a passionate advocate for health equity, a visionary scholar, and a skilled editor and collaborator. Within the tribute are several short remembrances in which individuals describe their association with Secundy to honor her as a leader, friend, scholar, advocate, and teacher in bioethics.

Brown, Virginia A. (2022) The Indefatigable Spirit of Marian Gray Secundy: Scholar, Activist, and Mentor. The Hastings Center Report

This special report contains five major sections representing different approaches to scholarship, including theoretical, empirical, and narrative forms. The first section features two target articles focused on anti-Black racism and health care settings, with each article accompanied by two commentaries. The second section includes four essays thematically centered around anti-Black racism and health equity research and practice. Section three features four essays that explore anti-Black racism and bioethics. The next section consists of four essays framing a braver, bolder, and broader bioethics. We conclude with a powerful tribute to the late Marian Gray Secundy, a bioethics luminary, friend, colleague, role model, and mentor, and a tie that binds together many bioethics scholars who prioritize social justice in their scholarship and praxis.

Fletcher, Faith, Smith Patrick, Ray, Keisha, Brown, Virginia A. (2022). Title: The Hastings Center Report

In the September-October 2021 issue of the Hastings Center Report, neither the article by MaryKatherine Gaurke et al. nor the article by Alex Rajczi et al. offers a comprehensive analysis of a just allocation of scarce resources—one “rooted in a collective agreement about what constitutes health in/justice.” This omission reflects a larger problem in bioethics: the field's praxis continues to fail to recognize and respond to the obligation to address the fair distribution of burdens and benefits that comes with the principle of justice. This commentary calls on bioethics to incorporate a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework as part of its praxis. The cocreation of crisis standards of care with community stakeholders, whether the standards were focused on treatments, vaccines, or novel community-engagement strategies, could set a new gold standard for the practice of social justice in research.

Brown, Virginia A. (2021). Centering Social Justice for Covid-19 Resources and Research. The Hastings Center Report, 51(5) 51-53.

A psychiatric advance directive (PAD) is a communication tool that promotes patients' autonomy and gives capacitated adults who live with serious mental illnesses the ability to record their preferences for care and designate a proxy decision maker before a healthcare crisis. Despite a high degree of interest by patients and previous studies that recommend that clinicians facilitate the completion of PADs, the rate of implementation of PAD remains low. Research indicates that many clinicians lack the necessary experience to facilitate the completion of PADs and to use them, and, as a consequence, do not effectively engage patients about PADs. This study developed practical recommendations for clinicians to improve their ability to communicate and facilitate PADs. We (1) thematically analyzed definitions of PADs published in 118 articles across disciplines, and (2) presented our recommendations for enhanced communication in clinical practice that emphasizes patient-centeredness, usefulness, and clarity, aligned with evidence-based practices that put patients' autonomy and understanding first. While there is no one-size-fits-all script to engage patients in complex conversations, our recommended strategies include an emphasis on patients' autonomy, the adaptation of word choices, the use of metaphor not simile, and checking for patients' understanding as effective methods of clinical communication.

Table, B., Thomas, J., Brown, V. A. (2020). Psychiatric Advance Directives as an Ethical Communication Tool: An Analysis of Definitions. The Journal of Clinical Ethics, 31(4) 353-363.

We live in an era of profound cultural change. During the past several years, the #MeToo movement has brought attention to how women are harassed across society, and unfortunately, academia is no exception. Frequent calls for change and a growing body of empirical literature have focused on gender discrimination and sexual harassment against women academics by other academics, including the covert ways in which women are denied opportunities for advancement. Most recently, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as Riah Milton and Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, both transgender women of color, have laid bare the discrimination and harassment that Black, Latinx, Asian, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex (LGBTQI) communities experience. Racial/ethnic discrimination and harassment are common in academia as well; Asian health care professionals have recently reported being spat on by patients and being told to go back to China,2 and the Black Lives Matter movement inspired the sharing of the frequent macroaggressions and microaggressions that Black health care professionals and academic professionals experience at #BlackInTheIvory.3

Brown, V. A., Salazar, R., & Jacobs, E.A. (2020) The Need for Stronger and Broader Patient-Perpetuated Harassment Policies in US Academic Medical

In May 2011, the clinical ethics group of the Center for Ethics at Washington Hospital Center launched a 40-hour, three and one-half day Clinical Ethics Immersion Course. Created to address gaps in training in the practice of clinical ethics, the course is for those who now practice clinical ethics and for those who teach bioethics but who do not, or who rarely, have the opportunity to be in a clinical setting. "Immersion" refers to a high-intensity clinical ethics experience in a busy, urban, acute care hospital. During the Immersion Course, participants join clinical ethicists on working rounds in intensive care units and trauma service. Participants engage in a videotaped role-play conversation with an actor. Each simulated session reflects a practical, realistic clinical ethics case consultation scenario. Participants also review patients' charts, and have small group discussions on selected clinical ethics topics. As ethics consultation requests come into the center, Immersion Course participants accompany clinical ethicists on consultations. Specific to this pilot, because participants' evaluations and course faculty impressions were positive, the Center for Ethics will conduct the course twice each year. We look forward to improving the pilot and establishing the Immersion Course as one step towards addressing the gap in training opportunities in clinical ethics.

Mokwunye, N, DeRenzo, E., Brown, V. A., Lynch, J., (2012). Training in clinical ethics: launching the clinical ethics immersion course at the Center for Ethics at Washington Hospital Center. The Journal of Clinical Ethics 23(2): 139-146.