When Life Hands You Lemons: Building and Maintaining Ethics Programs with Minimal Resources

It is a truth universally acknowledged that clinical ethicists are always in want of funding to build, expand, or even just maintain clinical ethics services. This leads to tough questions about how to best utilize minimal resources, including the limited time of professional ethicists, to build and maintain robust ethics programs in an era of tremendous clinical ethics need.

The panelists will present differing strategies of building and maintaining ethics programs when resources are constrained and limited. Each panelist will share specific strategies they have employed to build and maintain their own ethics programs that did not require substantial resources.

The first panelist will review their strategy of repurposing existing ethics structures and committees to better meet the ethics program’s needs and maximize the benefits of ethics stakeholders’ and volunteers’ contributions. The second panelist will highlight their strategy of building the ethics consultation competencies of ethics committee members in smaller, community hospitals that do not have professional clinical ethics support.

The third panelist will discuss their strategy of developing an open-access introductory bioethics education program to expand basic bioethics knowledge to both clinicians and the public. The fourth panelist will describe how reframing the roles and work of volunteers on committees across a large health system has increased engagement and shifted ethical culture toward a model of moral formation and deliberative community.

Through sharing these strategies, we hope to demonstrate how clinical ethicists can best build and maintain ethics programs without the benefit of substantial resources.