Revitalizing Health Care Ethics

“Revitalizing Health Care Ethics  presents a clear and empathic strategy for clinicians to take responsibility and trust their judgment as they confront ethical questions in the care of patients. This is a must read for clinicians and bioethicists, students and trainees, their teachers, and anyone concerned about the state of compassionate caregiving and the quality of patient care today.” –  Allan M. Brandt, Harvard University, USA

“This is a book that clinicians are sure to enjoy. It communicates a deep respect for clinicians and for their existing skills and capacities, including ethical capacities. It deserves to reach a wide audience of students, trainees, clinicians, and educators.” - Per Olav Vandvik, MD, PhD, University of Oslo, Norway

This open access book explores the origins and development of the clinician’s moral voice and how that voice is embedded in the informal ethical discourse of everyday health care. This moral voice, developed over the course of a lifetime—including through professional education and practice—enables clinicians to understand and address the ethical issues that arise in their everyday work with patients, families, and colleagues. The early chapters explain how health care students move from outsiders to insiders—members of the distinct moral and professional communities that define each particular field of health care. The book describes how students, trainees, and clinicians draw on and extend their own existing intellectual, emotional, and moral capacities, and how they use these capacities to address the daily challenges, ethical and otherwise, that arise in the clinic. This approach is designed both to empower clinicians and to inform bioethicists and others in their attempts to work more effectively within clinical settings.

This book is available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Stephen Scher is Senior Consulting Editor, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and Lecturer in Psychiatry, McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School, USA, and University of Sydney Medical School, Australia.

Kasia Kozlowska is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead and Clinical Professor in Psychiatry and Child & Adolescent Health at the University of Sydney Medical School, Australia.