One element of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities’ recently-piloted quality attestation portfolio for clinical ethics consultants is a “philosophy of clinical ethics consultation statement” describing the candidate’s approach to clinical ethics consultation. To date, these statements have been under-explored in the literature, in contrast to philosophy statements in other fields such as academic teaching. In this article, I argue there is merit in expanding the content of these statements beyond clinical ethics consultation alone to describe the author’s approach (...) to other important “domains” of healthcare ethics practice. I also claim such statements have at least three additional uses outside quality attestation: as a reflective practice learning tool to increase role clarity among practicing healthcare ethicists and bioethics fellows; assisting practicing healthcare ethicists in clarifying role expectations with those they work with; and helping inform developing professional practice standards. (shrink)

This article describes a qualitative study of models of ethics consultation used by ethics consultants in Canada. We found four different models used by Canadian ethics consultants whom we interviewed, and one sub-variant. We describe the lone ethics consultant model, the hub-and-spokes sub-variant of this model; the ethics committee model; the capacity-building model; and the facilitated model. Previous empirical studies of ethics consultation describe only two or three of these models.