Mark your calendars! the ABA Section of the Dispute Resolution’s 12th Annual Spring Conference is just around the corner: Section of Dispute Resolution Spring Conference April 8 – 10, 2010 Hyatt Regency Embarcadero San Francisco, CA To view the conference website, click here. To download the conference brochure and registration form, click here. Karl will be attending the conference and will be happy to meet you! please let us know if you will be attending.

By Holly Hayes Richard J. Webb, a guest-blogger on Disputing and author of the Healthcare Neutral ADR Blog, featured last week an excellent post on how the health care reform debate would look if it was mediated. Here is an excerpt: …. Leaving aside all of the ways in which the healthcare reform debate does not resemble the setting required for effective mediation, I began to imagine what I would do if thrust into a room with a commitment from both sides to mediate in good faith. Having reviewed the parties’ respective positions on numerous, individual proposals for reform, I first thought that there must be a way to parse and compromise among these proposals to reach a mutually acceptable outcome. But the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that such an effort would fail. I had an intuitive sense of why it would fail, but I struggled to explain that result in terms familiar to traditional mediation theory. In fact, I started a blog post on this subject, but put it aside, unfinished. Shortly after that, I read a description of the Frank Sander Lecture to be given by Professor Lawrence Susskind as the opening plenary of the ABA Dispute Resolution Section’s Annual Spring Conference on April 8th: “Values and Identity Conflicts: Proposing a New Dispute Resolution Doctrine.” The summary, which appears in the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution’s February Just Resolutions Enews (members only), turned on the light bulb in my head. Read the full post here. We appreciate Mr. Webb sharing his “light bulb” moment and welcome your comments on how the health care reform might look if it was mediated. Holly Hayes is a mediator at Karl Bayer, Dispute Resolution Expert where she focuses on mediation of health care disputes. Holly holds a B.A. from Southern Methodist University and a Masters in Health Administration from Duke University. She can be reached at: holly@karlbayer.com.

The ABA Section of Dispute Resolution announced the 2010 winners of its First Annual Mediation Video Contest on YOUTUBE. The First Prize Winner was “Consider Mediation” submitted by: Suzie Hollander, Susan Cox, Joanna Belbey, Elizabeth Bowers, Patricia Dineen, Amy Russ, Raymond Kramer, Darryl Scipio, Kenneth Andrichik, Jaleel Mosquera, Cassandra Georges, Robert Hollander, Evelyne Matthews, Arthur T. Matthews, Rosari Domenick, Julie Crotty. Check it out! Stay tuned to Disputing for the Second Prize and Honorable Mention Winners! Technorati Tags: ADR, law, arbitration

By Holly Hayes One month ago, we started our health care conflict resolution series (see Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV) focusing on the Roger Fisher, William Ury Getting to YES principled negotiation method involving: 1. Separating the people from the problem. 2. Focusing on interests, not positions. 3. Generating a variety of possibilities before deciding what to do. 4. Insisting that the result be based on some objective standard. Our final post in this series focuses on “using objective criteria.” In almost any negotiation, no matter how many options are generated to “split the pie,” there is still going to be a conflict of interests. As seen in our previous posts, the physician wants to continue his vacation and the nurse on the unit wants him to sign his verbal orders per hospital policy, the radiology director wants to decrease patient complaints and the technician wants to be heard so he can be part of the solution, the physician wants to sell his practice for a high price and the hospital wants to purchase it for a low price, the ED manager wants housekeeping to help with the cleaning and housekeeping wants to work within its budgeted number of staff. In each situation, there are objective criteria that can be used to decrease the likelihood that the negotiation will become just a contest of wills and the ongoing relationship can be saved. Objective standards allow both parties to commit to reaching a solution based on principle, not pressure. In our examples, objective criteria could be hospital policy, regulatory standards, industry standards, standards used by local hospitals or physician groups or budgetary constraints. As the parties begin the process of identifying objective criteria, they can: 1. Jointly search for reasonable criteria. 2. Be open to the most appropriate standards and how they can be applied. 3. Never yield to pressure from the other party, but defer to objective standards. Pressure can take many forms: bribes, threats, manipulative appeals to trust or a simple refusal to back down. The principled response in each of these situations is the same: invite the other party to state their reasoning, suggest objective criteria that may apply and finally, refuse to budge except on the basis of objective criteria. This is the final post in our series on using the principled negotiation method in health care conflict. Look for future posts on Disputing on utilizing proven conflict resolution techniques specifically in health care. We invite your comments on this post and any suggestions for upcoming posts. Technorati Tags: Healthcare, ADR Holly Hayes is a mediator at Karl Bayer, Dispute Resolution Expert where she focuses on mediation of health care disputes. Holly holds a B.A. from Southern Methodist University and a Masters in Health Administration from Duke University. She can be reached at: holly@karlbayer.com.