Mechanisms of defense in clinical ethics consultation.

Clinical ethics consultants respond to a multitude of issues, ranging from the cognitive to the emotional. As such, ethics consultants must be prepared to analyze as well as empathize. And yet, there remains a paucity of research and training on the interpersonal and emotional aspects of clinical ethics consultations-the so-called skills in "advanced ethics facilitation.

Do Clinical Ethics Fellowships Prepare Trainees for their First Jobs? A National Survey of Former Clinical Ethics Fellows.

Clinical ethics consultants provide a range of services in hospital settings and in teaching environments. Training to achieve the skills needed to meet the expectations of employers comes in various forms, ranging from on-the-job training to formal fellowship training programs. We surveyed graduates of clinical ethics fellowships to evaluate their self-reported preparedness for their first job after fellowship training.

On Transference in Clinical Ethics Consultation: Recognizing and Working through the Past in Surrogate Decision Making.

Clinical ethics consultants often confront the most difficult clinical encounters, typically in the setting of chronically critically ill patients and surrogate decision makers. These encounters require not only analytical skills but interpersonal skills as well. In this article, I focus on an interpersonal skill absent from the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities Task Force's Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation.

The Will Reconsidered: Hard Choices in Living Organ Donation.

In the following article, we illustrate an interview between a living donor advocate and a potential living organ donor in which the donor faced a hard choice: the reasons to donate and the reasons not to donate were equally persuasive. In the discussion that follows, we analyze the act of willing, what differentiates coercion and willing, and how the case study highlights a different, but by no means rare, instance in which donors feel paralyzed by the choice at hand. In such cases, we suspect that donor advocates either do not approve the potential donor for transplantation or simply remain neutral.