Rate My Professor Rosalind McDougall

McDougall’s research employs philosophical bioethics and qualitative methods to address practical ethical challenges in healthcare, including clinical ethics consultations, parental discretion in paediatric care, fertility preservation for prepubertal children, hospital visitor restrictions during infectious disease outbreaks, ethical issues in transgender youth healthcare, and implementation of voluntary assisted dying. She developed the world’s first ethical framework for decision-making about a child’s future fertility in collaboration with the Royal Children’s Hospital bioethics team. Key publications include the book 'When Doctors and Parents Disagree: Ethics, Paediatrics and the Zone of Parental Discretion' (2016, co-authored with Lynn Gillam), 'Ethics of fertility preservation for prepubertal children: Should clinicians offer procedures where efficacy is largely unproven?' (2017), 'When doctors and parents disagree: Ethics, paediatrics and the zone of parental discretion' (2017), and 'The zone of parental discretion and the complexity of paediatrics: A response to Alderson' (2018). She received an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellowship for her project on when health professionals should override parental decisions about children’s medical treatment. McDougall co-founded the Australasian Clinical Ethics Network and is a member of the Melbourne Clinical Ethics Group, contributing to clinical ethics support in hospitals since 2008. Her work has over 800 citations across 35 publications.