The Berman Institute holds an institutional commitment to clinical ethics, seeking to help shape the standards, practices, and intellectual foundations that guide ethical decision-making in health care. Through scholarship, education, policy engagement, and clinical partnerships, the Institute has advanced approaches that protect patient rights, support clinicians, and enhance the wellbeing of patients and clinicians alike across diverse medical settings.
Clinical Ethics
30 Years of Achievement
The Institute has produced influential scholarship that clarifies core concepts in clinical ethics, including patient autonomy, informed decision-making, surrogate decision-making, confidentiality, moral distress, and the obligations of clinicians in complex or high-stakes situations. Its faculty have contributed to the development of widely used frameworks for resolving bedside ethical dilemmas, helping clinicians navigate conflicts between patient preferences, medical judgment, institutional constraints, and family dynamics.
Improved education and training for current and future health care providers is a defining achievement. The Institute has developed the pioneering Ethics in Clinical Practice program that reaches residents in eight departments at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and provides additional clinical ethics education for practicing clinicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, and ethics committee members. Its workshops, fellowship programs, and graduate-level courses have helped build a more skilled and ethically reflective clinical workforce.Mentorship from Berman faculty has contributed to the development of the next generation of clinical ethicists who now lead programs nationally and internationally.
Developing and strengthening clinical ethics consultation services represent another major area of impact. At Johns Hopkins medical institutions and beyond, the Institute’s faculty have served as leaders in refining best practices for ethics consultations, including standards for training, documentation, evaluation, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Their work has improved the quality and consistency of ethics support provided in hospitals and long-term care settings, helping institutions better serve patients and families facing difficult medical decisions.
Clinical Ethics Highlights
Nursing Ethics for the 21st Century: Report of the National Nursing Summit
Report of the summit meeting on Nursing Ethics for the 21st Century, seeking to change the nation’s health care culture so that it more strongly supports basic ethics principles and more effectively enables nurses to practice more ethically.
Freeman Family Ethics for Lunch Series
A monthly conference series at Johns Hopkins Hospital bringing together physicians, nurses, medical students, social workers, chaplains, and others to discuss an important clinical ethics issue