Pace setters: Graduate profiles
Staff writer
As an ethics consultant at Vancouver Hospital and Health Sciences Centre, Rosalie Starzomski is regularly confronted with ethical dilemmas. And, as a nurse with a background in transplant nursing and nephrology -- the science of the structure and function of the kidney -- she is acutely aware of the ethical dilemmas concerning organ transplantation.
Now, with a PhD in Nursing, she has some pretty good ideas about how to delve into ethical issues that confront health care providers and consumers on a daily basis.
Starzomski, a native of Cape Breton, is among the first to graduate from the School of Nursing's PhD program. She and three others will make UBC nursing history when they accept their degrees at Spring Congregation.
The backbone of Starzomski's doctoral research involved the use of focus groups, which are commonly used in consumer research, to explore attitudes toward transplantation. She held 34 focus groups, interviewed 188 participants, and collected more than 2,000 pages of transcript data.
She worked with small, homogenous groups of health care providers -- doctors and nurses, for example -- and of health care consumers, such as transplant recipients, members of the news media, seniors, students and others.
The groups discussed issues such as the development of selection criteria for transplant recipients and the use of animal organs for transplantation and used example scenarios to help the discussion. Starzomski rated individual's views on transplantation from positive to negative, and the reasoning processes used from deliberative to emotional.
Her findings have implications for health policy, research and practice. She suggests health policy makers need to find ways to bring different groups together in convenient locations to discuss ethical and other issues in order to gain the perspective of multiple voices.
Focus groups were found to be an effective way to promote discussion of health care issues. In practice, she says, more opportunities should be created for interdisciplinary collaboration and consumer involvement in decision-making processes regarding aspects of health care services.
The results indicate a need to do further research with groups in rural areas, and with different ethnic and cultural groups. Also, Starzomski's finding that critical care nurses who work with transplant recipients tend to view transplantation in a negative light and are generally not organ donors themselves raises questions that need further exploration.
Starzomski is also a Vancouver-based University of Victoria faculty member and past-president of the Kidney Foundation of Canada's B.C. Branch. She remains deeply interested in questions surrounding the use of medical and genetic technology and maintains an optimistic outlook.
"There is always the possibility of people becoming tools of their technology, as in George Orwell's 1984, rather than the more optimistic future where people have learned to use technology wisely," she says. "My goal is to see us going in the optimistic direction in which we use technology as a resource to preserve some of the basic things we value as a society."