Abstract
Over the past 30 years, healthcare institutions in many countries have used Hospital Ethics Committees (HECs) to guide practitioners in relation to the ethical dimension of their clinical practice. Many states have encouraged or mandated hospitals to have a multi-professional membership in HECs to deal with the everyday ethical challenges that arise. As the mandate of HECs evolved, principle-based ethics became the dominant approach underpinning ethical consultation in HECs. In this chapter, I explore the discursive space of HECs. I propose and defend two reasons to explain why nursing ethical concerns are dismissed in these spaces: (1) the voices that are most heard and valued in discussing issues of concern in patient care are dependent on the hierarchical setting. Like hospitals, in HECS, profession, rank and academic degree often determine the extent to which permission is given to speak freely and authoritatively; (2) the application of principle-based ethics reduces the significance of care practices and dismisses nursing ethical concerns. I then turn to the development of care ethical approaches, the feminist turn in care ethics and the language they offer to grasp issues of nursing care and thematize the relevance of power. An analysis of two case consultations illustrates how a feminist approach can shed light on issues of care that nurses are struggling with.
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Notes
- 1.
See interview with Joan Tronto in this book.
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Kohlen, H. (2020). Hospital Ethics Committees and the Dismissal of Nursing Ethical Concerns: A Feminist Perspective. In: Kohlen, H., McCarthy, J. (eds) Nursing Ethics: Feminist Perspectives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49104-8_8
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