Robin Downing is both a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and a Doctor of Bioethics.  She is the Hospital Director of The Downing Center for Animal Pain Management, LLC, and was a pioneer in both modern veterinary pain management, as well as the translation of palliative and end-of-life care principles and practices from human medicine for application in clinical veterinary practice.  She remains in active, full-time, solo clinical practice, and the practice is American Animal Hospital accredited, Human-Animal Bond Certified, Fear Free™ Certified, and credentialed as Cat Friendly Practices with the American Association of Feline Practitioners.

Dr. Downing has received many regional, national, and international awards, including the 2001 Excellence in Veterinary Medicine Award from the World Small Animal Veterinary Association, the 2016 Erwin Small Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine, and the 2020 Leo K. Bustad Companion Animal Veterinarian of the Year Award from the AVMA.

Dr. Downing is currently engaged as a Visiting Scholar at the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University, working to translate bioethical principles and practices for formal application in clinical veterinary medicine.  She is also credentialed in the area of grief and bereavement (Colorado State University), having more than 300 hours of formal study with Clinical Thanatologist and psychologist Dr. Alan Wolfelt.  Dr. Wolfelt is an internationally renowned grief and bereavement expert, and (at this writing) she is the only veterinarian to have studied with him at this level.

Learning objectives that Dr. Downing will focus on during her presentation include:

Doing the Right Things for the Right Reasons in Effective Pain Management
Clinical bioethics has useful lessons for veterinary medicine, and pain management provides a useful paradigm for identifying those lessons.  This session will provide an overview of the foundational principles of clinical bioethics, illustrated by considering effective pain management strategies - - for both acute and chronic pain - - articulating how veterinary health care teams can leverage these principles to facilitate doing the right things for the right reasons.

Learning objectives:

·         Understand the foundational principles of clinical bioethics

·         Understand how bioethical principles apply to both clients and animal patients

·         Understand how to build an acute pain management strategy grounded in bioethics

·         Understand the importance of a multi-modal approach to chronic pain and its grounding in bioethics

 Veterinary Health Care Teams Have an Ethical Obligation to Provide Fear Free™ and Cat Friendly© Experiences

Foundational clinical bioethical principles provide a formal framework within which to understand how critical it is for veterinary health care teams to provide Fear Free™ and Cat Friendly© experiences for our patients and their human families.

Learning objectives:

·         Understand the basics of both Fear Free™ practices and Cat Friendly© practices

·         Understand the relevance of clinical bioethical principles as the undergirding of both Fear Free™ and Cat Friendly©

·         Understand how to advocate for patients in partnership with their humans from a bioethical perspective

  Palliative and End-of-Life Care - - Just Because We Can, Does That Mean We Should?

The end-of-life space is fraught with challenging decisions as our patients approach their time of death.  While the landscape of palliative care has changed dramatically, and continues to evolve, the options available for treatment and management of previously untreatable conditions continue to expand.  Our obligation to our patients and their families is to engage in shared decision-making, grounded in foundational principles of clinical bioethics, to answer the question, “Just because we can, does that mean we should?”

Learning objectives:

·         Understand how to leverage and apply current palliative and end-of-life care guidelines and practices

·         Understand how to apply foundational bioethical principles to both patients and clients as the pet approaches its end of life

·         Understand how those principles can provide a formal framework within which to navigate and discern the “should” from the “cans”