Template Clinical Ethics Fellowship


BECKET GREMMELS, PHD

System Vice President, Theology and Ethics CommonSpirit Health

Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas


STEVEN SQUIRES, PHD

Vice President, Ethics CHRISTUS Health Dallas-Forth Worth, Texas

LAURA WEBSTER, D.BIOETHICS, RN, HEC-C

Region Vice President, Ethics CommonSpirit Health Tacoma, Washington

ERICA LAETHEM, BEL, HEC-C

Director, Strategic Ethics Integration OSF HealthCare

Rockford, Illinois

SAM DETERS, PHD

Manager, Mission Integration SSM Health

St. Louis, Missouri

Clinical ethics fellowship programs serve a key function in training ethicists. They

provide unique opportunities for experiential learning from an experienced practitioner that complements academic coursework, similar to preceptorships or residencies in many other healthcare professions. However, there has been little work done to formalize the structure or expectations of what ethics fellowships offer.

Ellen Fox describes some attempts at such

formalization elsewhere in this issue. We offer here a template curriculum for clinical ethics fellowships as one more piece of this effort to provide more rigor in practical training for ethicists.


This project grew out of a workshop at the Catholic Healthcare Innovation in Ethics Forum (CHIEF) in 2023. Participants were divided into three breakout groups to brainstorm specific elements of a fellowship

curriculum: key observational opportunities, essential literature, and professions to learn about. Over the next 9 months, we met every other week to flesh out the results of that workshop into a functional template curriculum.


Clinical ethics fellows in Catholic healthcare have opportunities to serve a range of communities and expand their ethical framework and toolkit. Catholic healthcare offers unique clinical ethics fellowship experiences because of its mission and identity. Mission and Catholic identity animate a distinctive type of calling and service. These fellows benefit from the unique vocation of Catholic healthcare, even if they are uncertain about staying in Catholic healthcare.

The Mission of Catholic healthcare is advanced by professionals of a diverse array of religious and faith backgrounds; it is ecumenical by nature. The communities served by many Catholic healthcare systems are pluralistic and


often are not predominately Catholic. Those who work in Catholic health care embrace and celebrate these differences, exemplified in part by Directive 11 of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs) about responding appropriately to persons’ religious beliefs or affiliation. They also draw from the strengths of these diverse life experiences to further

Catholic health care’s commitment to promote and protect the dignity of all, especially the most vulnerable. Ethics fellows benefit from a focus on theological understanding of clinical ethics issues. Fellows can help make and draw out connections between faith traditions or provide alternative perspectives in the absence of faith traditions. Certainly, in maintaining its religious and moral commitments, Catholic healthcare benefits from having ethicists with both fellowship experience and academic training in theology and ethics who are already formed in the intellectual tradition. Secular health care systems also benefit from fellows

formed in the Catholic tradition. As one in five Americans identify as Catholic, ethics fellows from Catholic healthcare are better equipped to respond to needs of Catholic patients, families, and clinicians.

Ethics seeks to identify, unpack, and navigate values. Ethicists in Catholic health care have additional layers of moral analysis to consider, given the theological and social commitments derived from Church teaching. Fellows in Catholic health care will become adept at applying the ERDs and other Catholic teaching to individual cases. Fellows will be required to learn the ethical standards of practice, general moral norms, relevant laws and regulations which would apply in any health care context. Most healthcare facilities are not academic

medical centers, yet most clinical ethics fellowships currently exist in this setting. Catholic healthcare is more representative of the diversity of care settings across the care continuum, especially community hospitals, ambulatory care, and safety net healthcare settings. While the Ethics Consultant

(EC) practitioners who designed ASBH’s improvement projects generally work in large teaching hospitals with high-volume Ethics Consultation Services (ECSs) (Bruce et al.

2018; Fox 2016), most general hospitals in the

U.S. are quite small (50.1% have <100 beds and 71.3% have <200 beds), have no academic affiliation (61.5% are nonteaching hospitals and only 6.1% are major teaching hospitals), and perform between zero and three ECs per year (Fox et al. 2021).


Catholic health care also provides a unique setting to train ethics fellows. Catholic health care goes beyond physiological treatment by treating the whole person, with mind-body-spirit care. It creates a welcoming environment that encourages employees to be their authentic selves, including their religious beliefs, and considers how one can maintain personal, professional, and organizational integrity.

Fellows contribute to the mission, formation programs, and even assessment programs like the Ministry Identity Assessment from the Catholic Health Association, which has ethics components and is unique to Catholic healthcare. Given Catholic healthcare’s commitments to the poor and underserved,

fellows can better experience and engage with the needs of communities.

Finally, Catholic health care offers a formational opportunity to train ethicists through clinical ethics fellowships. This is a


needed pipeline not only to help form ethicists for Catholic healthcare, but also to train ethicists who might work outside Catholic healthcare to help them understand the important nuance that religious beliefs bring to medical decision making. Given the size of Catholic healthcare in the United States, there is also a potential for more fellowships than currently exist in primarily academic medical centers. Catholic health care has a great ability

to contribute to this growing area of health care education.


This template is written as one example for fellowship programs to adapt as needed. Not all elements will apply to all fellowships, and not all suggestions will be feasible in all hospitals.

More work also needs to be done in clinical ethics fellowships, in particular a formal assessment process to evaluate the progress of fellows towards functioning as independent ethicists after completion. We reference such an assessment but do not address it in detail as this project focused on the curriculum itself. Even still, we believe this template curriculum will help fellowship program directors in Catholic hospitals and non-Catholic hospitals as they create and revise their own curricula.

Purpose:


This one-year Clinical Ethics Fellowship is designed to provide fellows practical experience in daily clinical ethics work, including consultation services, ethics education, policy review, and ethics rounds. This program gives fellows exposure to clinical and organizational elements of healthcare. Fellows are expected to work collaboratively with Mission Integration and spiritual care while cultivating an understanding of Catholic healthcare.

Eligibility:


To be eligible to apply, prospective fellows must have a masters or doctorate degree in bioethics, theology, philosophy, or a related field.


Outcome:


The goal of the Clinical Ethics Fellowship is to provide the training and experience necessary to develop the knowledge, skills, ability, and character one should possess before entering the clinical ethics profession. Fellowship training

will emphasize developing ethics consultation skills sufficient to perform independent clinical ethics consultation in acute care settings, with a focus on Catholic health care settings.


Competencies:


This fellowship is a competency-based program, organized around the following competencies:


+ Identifying relevant Directives in particular consults

+ Discussing when the Directives might establish boundaries that may be different in non-Catholic hospitals

+ Demonstrating a working knowledge of how the Principle of Cooperation applies to commonly encountered issues