Ethics After Committees: Managing Change, Measuring Success, and Building Capacity within a System-wide Ethics Network

In response to years-long challenges associated with maintaining impactful ethics committees, our system (consisting of a large academic medical center and multiple community hospitals) redesigned ethics programming to enhance engagement and systematically build ethics competencies of employees regardless of role. Instead of ethics committees, professional clinical ethicists now support a structured, tiered professional development program that provides members with clarity and flexibility in meeting identified ethics competencies, expected contributions or functions, and time commitment. The presenter will share three planning and implementation aspects of this redesign that are of particular interest. First, they will review change management efforts with current committee members and system and hospital leadership, including preliminary work with colleagues in the Strategy Office, gaining perspectives from focus groups comprising current ethics committee members, and an incremental roll-out plan. Next, the presenter will describe our approach to measuring success of this new approach, involving standard program evaluation metrics such as number of new members, retention rates, and number of and satisfaction with education sessions. We also will measure success by gauging impact of the program on health care professional engagement—an often overlooked aspect of impact of participating in ethics programming. The presenter will close with an outline of our approach to curricular design, which focuses on building minimum ethics competencies to perform identified functions, such as identifying ethics issues, delivering standard ethics education content, facilitating ethics rounds or applying ethics knowledge across a range of situations in the diverse day-to-day work of network members.

Margot Eves, JD, MA – Staff Ethicist, Center for Bioethics, Cleveland Clinic; Cristie Horsburgh, JD – Staff Ethicist, Center for Bioethics, Cleveland Clinic