When you hear "health care ethics," I'm betting your mind goes right to clinical issues: at the bedside, in the intensive care unit, in the operating room, in the physician's office. The more fully informed might think about rationing, access or insurance. But mostly, our notions of health care ethics are rooted in an idea of the person as individual.
The 25th chapter of Matthew distills some of the concrete actions that Christian faith demands of its followers. But more important than any particular action is the call to cultivate our instinct to see Christ in the other and to respond to his or her needs as if they were the needs of Christ himself.
The Second Vatican Council developed the church’s classic definition of the common good more than 50 years ago when it described the common good as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups, and their individual members, relatively thorough access to their own fulfillment.”¹ This is a theological, and not simply a political, description. As such, it needs a bit of explanation, especially when it comes to understanding what “access to one’s fulfillment” means in the Catholic theological tradition.
The issue of ministerial identity for the Catholic health ministry has been an important one for the past decades. Early in the 2000s, the Catholic Health Association engaged the ministry regarding the issue of Catholic identity, resulting in the “Shared Statement of Identity for the Catholic Health Ministry," along with its core value commitments.¹
Finding ways that health care organizations can address the social determinants of health is a hot topic in health policy circles these days. It long has been known that social and economic factors have a significant impact on health, but addressing these factors traditionally has been the purview of government and philanthropic organizations, not health care providers. Why are policymakers now looking to health care to play a role?
The common good is one of those terms that most of us think we understand until we start talking about it. Our conversations too often become platitudinous and moralistic, feeling more and more abstract and vague. As one health care executive said to me, “How would I know if the common good bit me?"
Diversity is one of the hallmarks of our age. We hire and promote for diversity. Corporations have chief diversity officers, and they set diversity goals for their senior executives. We train our associates for cultural competency so that they can relate to our patients with greater sensitivity. In many ways, diversity is like Mom and apple pie — who could be against it?
Sooner or later, the members of any organization with an interest in ethics will ask themselves a critical question: Whose voices, experiences and concerns usually occupy the center, and whose have been relegated to the periphery?
When Kristen Moser enrolled in the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University Chicago, she said she was “subconsciously searching for an outlet to explore what it means to be a Christian.” Fortunately, she found one in the school’s Physician’s Vocation Program.
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