Center for Clinical Bioethics

Juergen Wallner

Section: Visiting Scholar Program

Jürgen Wallner, STD, will be a visiting scholar October 1, 200 - February 28, 2009. Dr. Wallner is an Assistant Professor, Post Doctorate Researcher at the University of Vienna, Austria; Faculty of Law; Institute for Ethics and Law in Medicine.

Research Topic: 1) Professionalism & Education; 2) Clinical Ethics Consultation

Background. Healthcare is under pressure from various sources: economic, technical, legal, and moral ones. This pressure could lead to a point where the centre of healthcare–care–is forgotten or neglected. The research project WHOCARES will contribute to ensuring the caring character of healthcare by analyzing and fostering notions of care in healthcare at the intersection of medicine/nursing, management, and law. For it is assumed that the future of healthcare will depend on the ability of individuals, organizations, and society to adequately understand, competently live, and emotionally share what care means to healthcare. Today’s bioethics often focuses on isolated questions like prenatal diagnostics, biobanking, or euthanasia. Although these topics must remain on the agenda of bioethical discourse, a complementary, more fundamental approach towards healthcare is needed for strengthening humane care in the future.

Objectives. WHOCARES will work on this task by concentrating on three core questions: (1.) the complex relations between individual acts, institutions, and character traits which altogether shape human behaviour; WHOCARES will develop an analytical framework to understand these relations better by combining institutional ethics and virtue ethics approaches. (2.) the clinical context; here, the project will evaluate different forms of ethics consultation services and their influence on the development and maintenance of a caring environment. (3.) the importance of a caring notion of professionalism for providing adequate healthcare; WHOCARES will engage in the recent international discourse about the meaning of and education in healthcare professionalism with special emphasis on the influence of Nazi ideology on the understanding of professionalism.

Methods. By combining ethical, medical/nursing, legal, and management perspectives and applying normative, empirical, and practical methods, the project represents a cross-boundary challenge both at the roots and the frontier of healthcare ethics. This is also reflected by the set-up of an international multi-professional team of medical, nursing, legal, ethical, and psychological competencies under the management of the Principal Investigator.

A stay the Center for Clinical Bioethics would provide a supreme environment for the research project due to its focus on organizational and clinical ethics, its work on ethics of care and professionalism, and its paramount faculty.