Plenary session A

Thursday 5 June 2025, 11:30 – 13:00, auditoire César Roux, CHUV

"Clinical ethics consultation (CEC) and conflict resolution"

This plenary session will focus on approaches and methods that are used, or may be used, in CEC for conflict resolution and prevention, broadly understood. Common conflicts in CEC include conflicts between ethical values and principles, between stakeholders (healthcare providers, patients, healthcare institutions), and between hierarchies, often complicated by intercultural tensions and underlying societal conflicts. This session will feature 4 speakers with diverse backgrounds, each one giving a short input talk, before embarking on a joint discussion with the public. Richard Huxtable (Bristol, UK) will focus on conflict resolution in clinical ethics, including mediation techniques. Anna Hirsch (Munich, DE) will add a philosophical perspective focusing on the resolution of value and norm conflicts. Sarah Barclay (London, UK) and Simon A. Mason (Zurich, CH) will provide two perspectives external to clinical ethics, coming from healthcare mediation and intercultural and political mediation.

Speakers

Richard Huxtable

 

 

Sarah Barclay

 

 

Anna Hirsch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Plenary session B

Thursday 5 June 2025, 16:30 – 18:00, auditoire César Roux, CHUV

“Racism in healthcare and equitable care access for migrants”
Supported by the Cantonal Office for the Integration of Foreigners and the Prevention of Racism

This plenary session will address the ethical challenges and problems resulting from (institutional or individual) racism in healthcare, in particular with regard to the issue of equitable access of migrant patients to quality care and treatment. 
To start this session, engage the audience and link the discussion to the concrete practice, we will use one or two real, anonymized case vignettes from clinical ethics as a starting point presented by Kristina Würth, IHM, Lausanne.
After that, a roundtable discussion with experts and stakeholders from various perspectives will be moderated. The panel consists of Amina Benkais Benbrahim (antiracism policy, City of Lausanne, CH), Nancy Berlinger (Hasting Center NY, USA), Rainer Tan (Head of Migrant Health Unit, Unisanté Lausanne, CH), and a patient or proxy with personal experience (information to be added).

Speakers

Richard Huxtable

Sarah Barclay

Anna Hirsch

 

Each panelist will start with a brief, informal comment on the case(s), followed by a more general round on the topic. Then, the audience will be invited to join the discussion, ask questions, and express comments. 


Plenary session C

Friday 6 June 2025, 09:00 – 10:30, auditoire César Roux, CHUV

"Clinical ethics consultation (CEC) and artificial intelligence"

This plenary will focus on the interplay between clinical ethics and artificial intelligence (AI). It will address ways how clinical ethics can help implement responsible AI in healthcare, but also highlight initiatives to use AI to improve clinical ethics itself (e.g., decision support tools, preference prediction models). After an overview about the interplay between clinical ethics and AI, given by Nikola Biller-Andorno (Zurich, CH), Karin Jongsma (Utrecht, NL) and Georg Starke (Munich, DE) will engage in a pro-con debate about the personalized patient preference predictor, a specific example of how AI may be used to help (or not) clinical decision making and clinical ethics.

Speakers

Richard Huxtable

Sarah Barclay

Sarah Barclay

 


Plenary session D

Friday 6 June 2025, 16:00 – 17:30, auditoire César Roux, CHUV

"Clinical ethics in the era of climate crisis”

This plenary will explore how questions of climate crisis and ecological sustainability impact clinical ethics and how organizational healthcare ethics can help hospitals and other healthcare providers to deal with sustainability challenges. A focus will be on the role and responsibility of the clinical ethicist in this larger societal challenge. The session will start off with a brief interactive online survey with the audience about their experiences and attitudes on the topic. It will then feature two major keynote talks on this topic by Cristina Richie (Edinburgh, UK), presenting suggestions for a “green clinical ethics”, and Andrew Hantel (Boston, USA) who has recently conducted research on this topic:

Speakers

Richard Huxtable

Sarah Barclay


Plenary session E

Saturday 7 June 2025, 11:30 – 13:00, auditoire César Roux, CHUV

"Clinical ethics consultation (CEC) and socio-political competencies:

the past, the present, and the future"

In this closing panel, we would like to zoom out to the big picture of clinical ethics and its links to socio-political challenges of our time. It should specifically address the core competencies that clinical ethicists of the future will need, in particular with regard to the socio-political dimension of clinical ethics. After a presentation of the new, 3rd edition of the ASBH Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultants given by Mark Aulisio (Cleveland, USA), the second part of the session will feature a dialogue between Stella Reiter-Theil (Basel, CH) and Laura Guidry-Grimes (Cleveland, USA) about the past, the present, and the future of clinical ethics and its links to larger societal challenges.

Speakers

Richard Huxtable

Richard Huxtable

Richard Huxtable