The goal of this open access book is to develop an approach to clinical
health care ethics that is more accessible to, and usable by, health
professionals than the now-dominant approaches that focus, for example,
on the application of ethical principles. The book elaborates the view
that health professionals have the emotional and intellectual resources
to discuss and address ethical issues in clinical health care without
needing to rely on the expertise of bioethicists. The early chapters
review the history of bioethics and explain how academics from outside
health care came to dominate the field of health care ethics, both in
professional schools and in clinical health care. The middle chapters
elaborate a series of concepts, drawn from philosophy and the social
sciences, that set the stage for developing a framework that builds upon
the individual moral experience of health professionals, that explains
the discontinuities between the demands of bioethics and the experience
and perceptions of health professionals, and that enables the
articulation of a full theory of clinical ethics with clinicians
themselves as the foundation. Against that background, the first of
three chapters on professional education presents a general framework
for teaching clinical ethics; the second discusses how to integrate
ethics into formal health care curricula; and the third addresses the
opportunities for teaching available in clinical settings. The final
chapter, "Empowering Clinicians", brings together the various dimensions
of the argument and anticipates potential questions about the framework
developed in earlier chapters.
