The Birth of Clinical Ethics Consultation as a Profession

摘要

The year 2013 may someday be seen as the year a new profession was born. Clinical ethics consultation has been practiced in different ways for roughly 30 years, originally initiated by a group of hospital chaplains in pastoral care such as George Kanotti, Joy Skeel, John Fletcher, and Stuart Sprague. They were all members of a group known as the SBC, Society for Bioethics Consultation. While modern bioethics had already been a subject of important publications for a decade, these were the pioneers who brought it to the bedside, and gradually came to change its name to clinical ethics to clarify its focus on patient care.