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Clinical and Organizational Ethics: Challenges to Methodology and Practice

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Abstract

The day-to-day work of clinical ethics consultants and healthcare ethics committees can easily become overly routine. Too much routine, however, comes with a risk that morally important practices will be reduced to mere bureaucratic formalities, while practitioners become desensitized to ethically significant distinctions between cases. Clinical ethics consultation and organizational ethics must be set within the broader social and cultural context of the healthcare environment. This practice requires looking beyond mere legal compliance and the routinely false assumption that there are unambiguous ethical norms that easily govern clinical ethics and hospital policy formation. Together the essays in this issue of HEC Forum challenge readers to rethink taken-for-granted assumptions regarding patient care, physician obligation, clinical ethics consultation, and organizational ethics.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., Lori Bruce’s exploration of the, at times, lack of explicit consent for intimate medical exams (2020).

  2. There are even questions regarding whether the principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice constitute the correct approach to medical ethics (see, e.g., Campelia and Feinsinger 2020).

  3. For recent exploration of patient care challenges associated with informed consent see (Lillehammer 2020; Sim 2020; Taylor 2019; Buckley and O’Neil 2020).

  4. For examples of additional challenges in clinical ethics see (Pilkington 2020; Health 2020).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, School of Arts and Humanities, St. Edward’s University, 3001 S. Congress Ave., Austin, TX, 78704, USA

    Mark J. Cherry

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Cherry, M.J. Clinical and Organizational Ethics: Challenges to Methodology and Practice. HEC Forum 32, 191–197 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-020-09422-8

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