Revitalizing Health Care Ethics : The Clinician’s Voice

Abstract

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.