Clinical ethics consultants navigate dilemmas across patient care, public health, and healthcare policy. Issues span from the beginning to the end of life, complex discharges, employment of novel technologies, and visitation restrictions. The second edition relays the narratives of fraught, complex consultations through richly detailed cases. Authors explore the ethical reasoning, professional issues, and emotional aspects of these impossibly difficult scenarios. Describing the affective aspects of ethics consultations, authors highlight the lasting effects of these cases on their practices. They candidly reflect on evolving professional practice as well as contemporary concerns and innovations while attending to equity and inclusivity. Featuring many new chapters, cases are grouped together by theme to aid teaching, discussion, and professional growth. The book is intended for clinicians, bioethicists, and ethics committee members with an interest in the choices made in real-life medical dilemmas as well as the emotional cost to those working to improve the situations.

‘This rich anthology reminds us that clinical case consultation is a complicated process that is personal and intuitive, often haunting practitioners with memories that are both disturbing and instructive. Professors Ford and Dudzinski have brilliantly capitalized on the pedagogical value of these musings, editing a volume that will enrich teaching in the seminar room or at the bedside. This new edition places the current generation of practitioners into conversation with their pioneering predecessors from the first edition, reminding readers of the enduring values that should inform case consultation. This volume belongs in the library of every student and teacher of bioethics.’

Joseph J. Fins - M. D., D. Hum. Litt. (hc), M.A.C.P., F.R.C.P.; E. William Davis, Jr., M.D. Professor of Medical Ethics and Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics; Weill Cornell Medicine and Chair of the Hastings Center Board of Trustees; Author of Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics and the Struggle for Consciousness

'This volume provides a distinct and rare look at the inner workings of ethics consultation. The new edition probes more deeply yet, and a series of commentators revisits the original cases by posing questions or offering observations that invite greater reflexivity and deeper insights. The commentators are compassionate but unflinching, pushing the reader into deeper and more troubling waters than before. This is an invaluable resource for both the novice practitioner and the experienced ethicist, suitable for quiet introspection or lively classroom/boardroom discussion. It sparks the sort of intergenerational and cross-cultural conversations that our field now knows are long overdue.'

Ann M. Heesters - Senior Director, Department of Clinical and Organizational Ethics, UHN Education Investigator II, TIER (The Institute for Education Research); Assistant Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health; Research Adjunct Professor, Michener Institute of Education; Wilson Centre Scholar; Member, Joint Centre for Bioethics, University of Toronto

'For those who practice or are interested in clinical ethics consultation, this volume is a must read. Bioethicists familiar with the first edition will find much to reflect on in the commentaries that were added in the second, and bioethicists unfamiliar with the first edition will benefit from both the original case discussions, as well as the new commentaries. As the editors note, the original edition is a core resource suggested by the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) for those studying for the HEC-C exam, and the new edition will likely find its way to that list, as well. The book should also be of interest to advanced undergraduates and graduate students in the humanities as well as the medical sciences interested in the ethically normative aspects of clinical medicine. The case presentations make for excellent conversation starters for classroom discussion, and the chapters are structured well for anyone employing debate pedagogy in a course.'

Bryan Pilkington Source: Journal of Hospital Ethics