Abstract
Organizational ethics—defined as the alignment of an institution’s practices with its mission, vision, and values—is a growing field in health care not well characterized in empirical literature. To capture the scope and context of organizational ethics work in United States healthcare institutions, we conducted a nationwide convenience survey of ethicists regarding the scope of organizational ethics work, common challenges faced, and the organizational context in which this work is done. In this article, we report substantial variability in the structure of organizational ethics programs and the settings in which it is conducted. Notable findings included disagreement about the activities that comprise organizational ethics and a lack of common metrics used to assess organizational ethics activities. A frequently cited barrier to full engagement in these activities was poor institution-wide understanding about the role and function of organizational ethics resources. These data suggest a tension in the trajectory of organizational ethics’ professionalization: while some variability is appropriate to the field’s relative youth, inadequate attention to definitions of organizational ethics practice and metrics for success can impede discussions about appropriate institutional support, leadership context, and training for practitioners.
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Notes
Mission roles, or mission integration leaders, are common leadership roles in faith-based healthcare. Customarily members of the executive leadership team, their purpose is to integrate the organization’s mission and values into clinical and operational work throughout the institution.
To best of our knowledge, this is the first (and therefore largest) survey that collects information about the practice of organizational ethics in healthcare (that is, that characterizes the work of ethicists who are engaged in the identification, analysis, and resolution of organizational values in healthcare institutions). We have only been able to find surveys that characterize organizational ethics issues in healthcare (e.g., Silva et al., 2008), surveys of healthcare ethics practice [which do not exclusively focus on organizational ethics, and primarily focus on clinical ethics] (e.g., Danis et al., 2021), and surveys of ethical climate within healthcare organizations (e.g. Dziurka et al., 2022).
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Turner, K., Lahey, T., Gremmels, B. et al. Organizational Ethics in Healthcare: A National Survey. HEC Forum (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-023-09520-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-023-09520-3