The Center supports its sponsors and the community through health care ethics leadership, service, education, and scholarship at clinical, organizational, and health policy levels.

 

Mission

The Minnesota Center for Health Care Ethics promotes ethically informed health care decision making, from the bedside to the boardroom, from patient care to public policy. Its mission is to:

 

  • assist patients, families, health care professionals, students, educators, administrators, and policy makers in ethically informed decision making
  • generate and communicate ethical concepts, principles, and frameworks
  • explore the perspectives that diverse faith and cultural traditions bring to health care decision making
  • promote health care ethics education in clinical and academic settings
  • make scholarly contributions to the fields of health care ethics and policy

Vision

To foster community-wide solutions to ethical and policy quandaries in health care through collaborations of scholars, providers, health plans, advocates, spiritual leaders, and policy makers.

 

Service to Sponsors

The Center serves its Sponsors by engaging in education, policy development and consultation regarding issues in organizational, clinical, health policy, public health, and research ethics. Center staff members serve on Sponsors' ethics committees, institutional review boards, and other committees. The Center enables collaboration among the Sponsors and the broader communities they serve on a wide array of health care ethics projects.

Service through Collaborative Leadership

It is our trademark to take on issues in health care ethics or health policy that call for community-wide or large scale collaborative solutions. To do so, we create a neutral table and facilitate diverse stakeholders' work to develop ethical frameworks and strategies addressing concrete issues of the day. Since the Center's founding in 1994, we have partnered with health systems, academia, professional organizations, government agencies (local, state, and federal), third-party payers, private industry, and civic, faith-based and community groups to address ethical issues that cannot be solved by any single stakeholder. 

Key Areas of Scholarship

The Center's scholarship focuses on five major themes.

 

  • Public Health Ethics, including Disaster Ethics
  • Health Care Reform
  • Healthy Aging and End-of-Life Decision Making
  • Diverse Faith and Cultural Perspectives
  • Emerging Technologies