Preconference Sessions

The 2026 Program Committee is delighted to announce the full array of Annual Conference Preconference Workshops. Join us for one of these sessions to learn a new skill, develop your existing practice, or consider a new perspective.

All preconference workshops will take place Wednesday, October 14 at the JW Marriott Indianapolis. All session times indicated are in the EasternTime Zone. If you have already registered, you can add a workshop to your existing registration by visiting the online portal (guide) or by calling Member Services at 847.375.4745.

HEC-C Review Course (001)

2–6 PM
Speakers: Mark Ard, MD MA HEC-C; Abram Brummett, PhD HEC-C; Anca Dinescu, MD HEC-C; Annie Friedrich, PhD HEC-C; Emily Grime, DPS MS HEC-C
Price: $200

Developed and presented by ASBH HEC-C Review Course Task Force members, this course will provide a thorough review of the core references and four content domains through the use of sample questions and discussion about the examination content outline. The course will be highly interactive, with opportunities for attendees to test their knowledge and connect information with the content outline and core references as a review framework. The 4-hour session will include discussion and practice test questions for each of the following:  

• Healthcare Ethics Issues and Concepts: Big Picture
• Healthcare Ethics Issues and Concepts: Clinical Encounters 
• Healthcare Systems and Health Law
• Clinical Context
• Local Healthcare Organizations and Policies 

Each attendee will receive a HEC-C Study Guide featuring an extended analysis of the sample questions following the session.

Grant Writing for Interdisciplinary Bioethics Research in a Changing Funding Environment (002) 

1:30–4 PM
Speakers: Mildred Cho; Chenery Lowe; Amy McGuire, JD; Krystal Tsosie, PhD
Price: $125

Successful grant writing for interdisciplinary bioethics research is a perennial challenge that is further complicated by the current funding environment requiring researchers to diversify funding sources and reframe equity-related research. This pre-conference workshop uses didactic and interactive activities to prepare attendees to develop successful grant proposals for bioethics research. Four mini-lectures will cover: 1) Applying common strategies for grant writing across proposal types and funders, 2) Framing the significance of bioethics research for a non-bioethics audience, 3) Pivoting or re-framing bioethics-related research due to changes in research priorities, 4) Leveraging available grant-writing resources. Following each lecture, attendees will apply the strategies to their own proposal. Lectures will be led by experienced grant writers from multiple disciplines and institutions: 1) An investigator with consistent NIH funding over almost 20 years with multiple current funded projects through the NIH, NEH, and foundations; who has reviewed and sat on advisory boards for two NIH institutes and a grant-making foundation, 2) A social scientist and empirical bioethicist who has written successful NIH training and research grants since 2012; reviewed grants for NIH, NSF, and Wellcome Trust; and serves on an extramural advisory board to the NIH, and 3) A community-engaged scholar whose research examines ethical, governance, and equity issues in biomedical and genomic research, securing federal and foundation funding bioethics, public health, and life sciences projects. The moderator is a postdoctoral fellow with a background in public health, communications, and ELSI research.

Community Engagement in Practice (003) 

2:30–5:30 PM
Speakers:Megan Allyse, PhD; Karen Meagher, PhD; Marsha Michie, PhD; Aaron Goldenberg, PhD
Price: $150

Bioethics and health humanities has long called for engagement with affected patient communities and populations impacted by advances in medical innovations, including communities with historically lower access to novel screening and treatments. Nevertheless, opportunities for, and examples of, building engagement capacity in these fields remain limited. Attendees of this workshop will build familiarity and skills in four stages of community engagement. Presenters will draw from prior and ongoing projects to explore these areas as follows:

a) The goals of engagement can serve a variety of normative ends, including: earning trust, empowering patients through research, advancing health equity, and establishing more inclusive forms of knowledge production. Clarifying which of these goals is most important to you and your research partners is an often overlooked initial step.

b) Proactively structuring engagement relationships, including budgetary and logistical considerations forms a strong foundation for partnership. Patient advocacy partners can serve as key liaisons to communities that also offer longevity beyond a project end; project-based advisory groups can develop partnership across all research stages; and de novo engagement strategies can create new relationships through research.

c) Engagement facilitation strategies serve to lessen power differentials, draw out shared values, and build trust. Presenters will discuss and foster skills in various approaches, including deliberative democracy, community listening tours, and community co-creation sessions.

d) Evaluating engagement efforts strengthens the transferability of insights and fosters ongoing collaboration through continuous improvement. Attendees will gain familiarity with ways to evaluate partnership success, including co-developing measures of successful engagement with community partners.

Beyond Case Discussions: Training Committee Members to Contribute to Clinical Ethics Work (004) 

2:30–5:30 PM
Speakers: Leah Eisenberg, JD MA HEC-C; Joan Henriksen, PhD RN HEC-C 
Cost: $150

Healthcare ethics committees (ECs) benefit from including a diversity of disciplinary perspectives, but clinician volunteers likely have inconsistent education in clinical ethics. Often, committee education focuses on theoretical knowledge and case discussions with little emphasis on practical skills. Even ethics committee members (ECMs) who do not plan to lead ethics consultations should receive skills-based training so they better understand the process of ethics consultation, the complexity involved, and how the way the consultant frames an ethics question impacts the analysis and recommendations that follow.

This workshop will offer accessible, dynamic tools for teaching ECMs how to structure and write ethics questions. Our time together will be interactive, using conversation, reflection, and hands-on activities to practice the discrete steps involved. Exercises will highlight the importance of naming stakeholders and their values and demonstrating how defining the action under consideration guides the rest of the consult. We will invite participants to discuss barriers they have encountered when training EMCs and share our own, including unanswerable questions, negatively framed consult requests, and the difficulty ECMs face when they “change hats” between their day job and thinking about clinical ethics.

The workshop leaders are experienced clinical ethicists who regularly lead skills-based courses about ethics consultation for ECMs with a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. We have seen what works (and doesn’t) when teaching ECMs what clinical ethics truly involves so they can enhance their ability to meaningfully participate on the EC.

Conflict Resolution Skills for Ethics Committees (005) 

4:15–6:15 PM
Speakers: Haavi Morreim, JD PhD
Cost: $100

Often, ethics consults stem not from moral puzzlement, but from conflict - - staff tensions about a complex situation, a "difficult" patient, intra-family feuds, and myriad other scenarios. Here, the optimal consult usually is not opining about ethics, but resolving conflict: exploring the situation, learning the back-stories that fuel the conflict, helping people articulate their most important priorities, and forging a mutually agreeable plan. Ethics committees and consultants must be prepared to discern what approaches and resources will best suit each consult.

This workshop teaches clinical conflict resolution, including negotiation, facilitation, and assisted negotiation. The workshop begins by presenting a key "toolset" of skills, such as: managing expectations, affect labeling, normalizing, active listening, and probing for detail. These core techniques help build the trust on which successful resolution relies, thereby enabling those in conflict to reach their own workable agreements. Practice scenarios are interwoven so participants can gain comfort in using each skill.

The workshop culminates in a two-part exercise focused on a complex problem of family dynamics. In Part One, small-group consult teams will "huddle" to discuss how best to approach the situation. Following a debrief, smaller pairings then conduct conflict resolution conversations. Everyone will participate in all practice exercises, followed by extensive debriefing for each.

The presenter is a highly experienced and frequent mediator, both for the courts and in the clinical setting. She teaches 4-day conflict resolution/mediation trainings for clinicians, has co-taught 5-day mediation trainings designed for attorneys, and also provides full-day "communications bootcamp" trainings for residents.