Ethical Deliberation in Multiprofessional Health Care Teams

Introduction to Part 2

Introduction to Part 2 Kenneth R. Melchin Currently, health care practitioners who must wrestle with ethical issues in their daily work experience are confronted with a diversity of theories and principles in the field of ethics. Professionals do not have a standardized set of ethical tools and methods for deliberating and deciding on issues. Rather, they must choose among diverse sets of such tools. Furthermore, their own personal choices are never the last word. They must work with other professionals whose approaches to ethics are often quite different. These differences often give rise to conflicts. In health care institutions,these conflicts often must be resolved through discourse among the various professionals involved in health care practice. This situation is not unique to health care. To an ever-increasing degree , researchers in ethics are turning their attention to the analysis of ethical discourse and are developing theories on how the process of discourse can be guided to yield constructive dialogue amid conflictingethical convictions.Many are finding that even when interlocutors differ on ethical issues, they can still find common agreements about the procedures and goals of the discourse that will allow them to work through issues toward mutually acceptable action strategies. While the field of ethics has been turningits attention to the process of discourse, the field of conflict resolution has been developing theories and practical tools for the analysis and management of conflicts in diverse spheres of life. The goal of the second part of this study is to draw upon published literature in ethical theory and conflict resolution to develop a coherent theoretical perspective on ethical deliberation and to develop practical tools that can help health care professionals in the deliberation process in multiprofessional teams. To do this, we draw upon the work of the Canadian philosopher-theologian Bernard Lonergan for the ethical theory framework for synthesizingthe contributions from these diverse fields of research. 95 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVESFROM THE FIELDS OF ETHICS AND CONFLICT STUDIES Chapter 6, by James Sauer, presents a brief survey of the field of discourse ethics, identifies two main lines of theory in this field and proposes an argument for drawing on both lines of theory for a comprehensive understandingof ethical discourse. Chapter 7, by Kenneth R. Melchin, introduces the ethical theory of Bernard Lonergan to develop a framework for introducingcontributions from discourse ethics and conflict resolution intoethical deliberation in health care. Chapter 8, by Peter Monette, surveys research contributions in conflict resolution and draws upon the work of Lonergan to propose a set of insights for applying conflict resolution to ethical deliberation in health care teams. 96 ...