Elements of Moral Experience in Clinical Ethics Training and Practice

Elements of Moral Experience in Clinical Ethics Training and Practice: Sharing Stories with Strangers will be a significant and important contribution to the practice of clinical ethics consultation. Rather than merely tell readers what is relevant, Virginia Bartlett has invited them to engage with both the common and unique in clinical experiences. Professor Bartlett’s tolerance for the discomforts of taking a clear-eyed look creates this accessibility. With that careful eye and a generous voice, she provides opportunities for a reader to make their own assessment about the ways these stories match up with real life experiences in health care. Not only will the reader learn about the evident and the more subtle ways that a person working as an ethics consultant encounters people, questions, standpoints, even values, and so on, they will also learn about what actually happens in our very human experience of health care.

- Mark J. Bliton, PhD, Director of Medical Bioethics at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA. He is Editor, with Stuart G. Finder, PhD, of Peer Review, Peer Education, and Modeling in the Practice of Clinical Ethics Consultation: The Zadeh Project, Springer 2018.

“In this highly engaging and original work, Bartlett uses herself as an example to offer a deeply personal and realistic sense of what it actually is like to do ethics consultation, including the intellectual, emotional, and even physical experiences involved. In so doing, she exquisitely illuminates how clinical ethics practice is itself a kind of moral undergoing – one that entails far more than mastering and applying knowledge or rote skills.”

- Stuart G. Finder, Ph.D., Director, Center for Healthcare Ethics, Cedars-Sinai

“In Elements of Moral Experience in Clinical Ethics Training and Practice, Dr. Bartlett shows practitioners of clinical ethics – and practitioners of being human - how to acknowledge their responsibility through the collective recollection of stories that help make sense of what it means to care for one another.”

- Joseph B. Fanning, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medicine, Associate Director, Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, Vanderbilt University

“This book offers a unique, genre-bending text that would be useful to trainees, graduate students, instructors, and preceptors. There is a deficit of clinical ethics literature focused on the experience, to use the author’s own words, of “doing ethics.” The author’s use of stories from her training and career intermingled with reflection and theory is an innovative way to help students and trainees early in their career better understand the work of clinical ethics.”

Stephanie Larson, Lecturer in the Department of English at Case Western University

Virginia L. Bartlett is an assistant professor of biomedical sciences and assistant director of the Center for Healthcare Ethics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA. She is a past chair of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs committee for the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.