• Ethics

The main goal of our paper ‘The Critical Dialogue method of Ethics Consultation’ was to make a particular method of clinical ethics facilitation visible and therefore accessible to others. We believe that our method is a good one, but the idea behind exposing and explaining a method of ‘doing’ clinical ethics was not to claim that our model was the ideal model for clinical ethics facilitation or the most effective in achieving ethical resolution. Instead, we wanted to enable readers to ‘see’ a set of specific goals of ethics facilitation and to ‘see’ the facilitation steps used to achieve them.

By uncovering and demystifying the ethics facilitation processes and goals, our objective was to advance the scholarship of clinical ethics work. To advance scholarship in fields of education and research, the work or practice must be public, available for peer review and critique according to accepted standards and able to be reproduced and built on by other scholars.1

The five responses to the ‘Critical Dialogue’ (CD) method paper suggest that we have achieved our objective of advancing scholarship in clinical ethics work. In the responses, we see ethicists engaging with our method, reflecting on their own methods and goals, and thinking critically about the nature of clinical ethics work and how to do it well.

In this brief response, we discuss three key issues raised in the responses to the ‘critical dialogue’ paper and then identify how they could be used to further refine and broaden specific steps of our method (table 1).