WHY JESUIT MATTERS
EMBRACING THE GRAY
AMANDA HINE’S WORK BRINGS CLARITY TO SOME OF HEALTHCARE’S MURKIEST ISSUES
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MANDA HINE IS OFTEN NEEDED ON SOMEONE’S WORST DAY. As a rising
leader and consultant in Denver’s healthcare ethics field, Hine offers her insight on healthcare’s most challenging questions, providing perspective on real-life circumstances such as reproductive issues and end-of-life dilemmas. These cases may involve people who aren’t able to make decisions for themselves or who must consider complex religious or moral factors. “These decisions are so emotional,” Hine said. “They’re so complicated. There’s so much uncertainty that even in cases that seem pretty clear, there’s still so much gray to wrestle with.” That gray area is exactly where Hine thrives. Besides working as an assistant professor of healthcare ethics at Regis, she volunteers as a healthcare ethics consultant for the Boulder Community Health (BCH) system. She also serves on ethics committees for BCH, Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver and the Colorado Healthcare Ethics Forum. In these roles, she provides on-call insight for real situations in which she adheres not only to ethical guidelines, but in the case of working for a faith-based hospital like Saint Joseph, the religious and ethical directives of the Catholic Church. What patients and Church leaders want some-
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times conflict, Hine says, in issues such as tubal ligation, which some women seek for birth control. Even in these high-pressure environments, Hine sees her work as a privilege. “I don’t think that I could teach without the opportunity to provide service, so I’m so grateful to the University for supporting [me],” she said. “And just to be out there in the community, to help and to live the Jesuit values in what for me feels like a very authentic form … it’s always a joy, even the worst cases.” Although she’s not Catholic herself, Hine attended multiple Jesuit schools. She says the Jesuit values seemed distant to her until she came to Regis, and is now grateful for the chance to imbue those values within her teaching. “I really enjoy the freedom that the Jesuit values allow for people of a lot of different faiths and faith backgrounds to really live as their most moral and most true selves... [The values are] very much how we practice at Regis, and how we teach our students.” Because healthcare ethics is a core requirement across disciplines within the Rueckert-Hartman College for Health Professions, Hine teaches a wide array of students about navigating ethical decisionmaking when there’s rarely a right answer.
Fall/Winter 2019 | REGIS UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE
Often, to understand all sides of an issue, she asks her students to defend the opposite viewpoint from the one they truly believe. “In a lot of ways, it’s integral to unteach some things, almost,” she said. “[Ethics is] very different from other kinds of clinical education, where the goal is to provide knowledge. My goal in ethics classes is to provide some uncertainty.” To teach some of that uncertainty, Hine uses her knowledge and experience from the real world of healthcare ethics to present her students with case studies. “It is often the case that the real-life scenarios are stranger than fiction. A lot of times I have students say, ‘This would never happen.’ [I’ll respond,] ‘Well, this happened on Thursday.’” Using those case studies allows Hine to do the important work of bringing theoretical concepts to life, helping her students be prepared for some of the most difficult moments in their future careers. “The idea of really being able to seek out the Jesuit values in ourselves and in a community is really empowering, especially coming from such a secular background.” — MKJ