Ethical Skills for Your Organization
Healthcare leaders often say that they want to build ethical capacity. From providing frontline care to developing software applications, ethical issues arise throughout healthcare. The goal of building ethical capacity is to prevent ethical breaches and promote a more ethical healthcare system. However, when I explore this valuable goal with leaders, a common issue is that there’s a gap between the vision—a more ethical organization—and the specific skills employees need to achieve it.
Commonly, organizations have ethics education sessions for their employees, which usually take a one-size-fits-all approach. This is a missed opportunity, since building ethical capacity requires multiple approaches. The goal is to identify the various skills that go into ethical conduct and develop ways to foster them in employees. This skill-building is one important element. Other factors, such as developing and promoting the organization’s values and infrastructure (e.g., a confidential way to report issues) are also key parts to a well-developed ethical organization.
With that in mind, here are some of the ethical skills Canmore Ethics focuses on when we work with organizations. Some of them are more appropriate for some roles than others, which proves that building ethical capacity requires deliberation and tailoring to suit each situation. The vast majority of ethics education approaches are too blunt a tool to make meaningful progress. Instead, Canmore Ethics builds organization-specific strategies and resources that lead to more lasting improvements.
Identifying values tensions
The foundation of ethical deliberation is recognition that ethical issues arise when values are in tension or conflict. The more important the values and the greater the stakes, the more serious the ethical issue. Since there isn’t one single value that an organization ought to care about, but rather many, values tensions are unavoidable. In healthcare, values include promoting patient safety, autonomy, well-being, and privacy; cost control; efficiency; staff safety; and many others. Employees in healthcare organizations who encounter ethical issues must recognize that these conflicts are inevitable, and they should be able to identify what the tension is. For leaders, this skill is essential.
Determining the appropriate action
The ethically appropriate way to resolve a tension in values will be determined by the situation. If the issue concerns a specific patient, that patient’s values and preferences should determine the plan of care. If a health IT company is weighing the values of privacy and the effectiveness of their software, then decision-makers will have to assess the options available, the risks and benefits of each, and then determine which path to choose. Once again, while some values, such as patient safety, have more weight, there isn’t usually an easy checklist or other process to follow that will always deliver the best answer.
Anticipating ethical risk
Organizations need processes in place when ethical issues arise, but it’s also important that leaders identify vulnerabilities and mitigate them before they cause harm to the public and the organization. One way to do this is to have an ethical risk audit performed, which Canmore Ethics does for organizations. This involves assessing the processes, personnel, and culture of the organization to determine sources of ethical risk and ways to mitigate them. It’s valuable to have an outside, ethics-focused perspective, but leaders in every organization must be on the lookout for sources of ethical risk. Since a single ethics crisis can irreparably damage an organization, ethical risk is as important as other foundational roles of leaders, such as financial forecasting.
Identifying the specific ethically-laden situations employees encounter will lead to determining the skills they need to address them. Leaders can then determine the best way to foster these skills. The end result is an organization with the ethical capacity to effectively manage ethical issues and mitigate ethical risk.
