Preconference Sessions
The 2025 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 22 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. All session times indicated are in the Pacific Time 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; Margaret “Maggi” Budd, PhD MPH ABPP HEC-C; Anca Dinescu, MD HEC-C; Annie Friedrich, PhD HEC-C; Emily Grime, DPS MS HEC-C; David Oxman, MD HEC-C
Price: $175
Developed and presented by ASBH HEC-C Review Course Task Force members, this online 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.
Leveraging Humanities and Arts in Clinical Ethics Education (002)
2–4:30 PM
Speakers: Margie Hodges Shaw, JD PhD MA HEC-C; Erik Larsen, PhD; Chris Mooney, PhD MPH MA; Natercia Rodrigues, MD MS
Price: $125
This interactive, 2.5-hour workshop will explore how integrating humanities- and arts-based methods can support clinical ethics education. The session will demonstrate how engagement with film, visual art, and narrative can foster reflection on personal and professional values to enhance ethical decision-making skills. To illustrate the usefulness of these methods for ethics education, the workshop will guide participants as they analyze visual and narrative works inspired by challenging clinical and ethical situations. This process will deepen participants’ self-awareness and empathy while developing strategies to navigate real-world clinical dilemmas. Beyond increasing personal sensitivity to diverse moral perspectives, the workshop will prepare participants to conduct similar interactive trainings with ethics students at their own institutions. The workshop will also cover evidence-based approaches to evaluating the effectiveness of these pedagogical strategies in clinical ethics education. Participants will leave with practical tools and assessment frameworks they can implement at their own institutions. Participants will gain insight into innovative teaching methods that make ethics education more engaging, reflective, and impactful for learners in healthcare settings. The workshop will be led by interdisciplinary faculty from the University of Rochester’s Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics—a department with a long history of integrating humanities and arts-based approaches into clinical ethics education. Presenters include faculty with expertise in narrative medicine, visual arts, medical education evaluation, and clinical ethics.
Conflict Resolution Skills for Ethics Committees (Conflict Management, Part I) (003)
2:30–4:30 PM
Speaker: Haavi Morreim
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.
Beyond Case Discussions: Training Committee Members to Contribute to Clinical Ethics Work (004)
3–6 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.
Comparing Models for Clinical Ethics Consultation: Which Approach is Best for Pediatrics? (005)
5–7 PM
Speakers: Brian Carter, MD FAAP; Kelstan Ellis, DO MS-CR MBe; Jeremy Garrett, PhD; Stephanie Kukora, MD
Cost: $100
Resolving ethical challenges in pediatrics is difficult. No standard approach to clinical ethics consultation exists, and significant variability arises within and between institutions. Multiple models for ethical analysis have been proposed, each with specific strengths and weaknesses, particularly in the pediatric context. In this interactive workshop, participants will collaboratively explore, apply, and test four models of ethics consultation:
- The “four box” approach proposed by Jonsen-Siegler-Winslade (which separates areas of analysis into four domains: medical indications, patient preferences, quality of life, and contextual features)
- The Orr-Shelton method (which outlines a formal process for completing and documenting ethics consultation in a manner mirroring many other clinical consultation models in medicine)
- The Zurich model (which offers a 7-step protocol intended to facilitate moral inquiry, deliberation, and consensus through effective communication, mediation, implementation of the plan, and appropriate follow-up)
- The QUAR framework introduced by the Children's Mercy Bioethics Center (which identifies a four-step process for completing an ethics consultation: Question, Understand, Assess, Recommend)
Following a brief didactic session introducing each model and describing its strengths and weaknesses for pediatric ethics, breakout groups led by ethicist facilitators will analyze a complex pediatric ethics case to gain further experience with practical application of these models. Finally, the groups will reconvene to compare their findings, discuss implications, and identify how elements of each model may have benefit in specific cases and circumstances. Participants will also be provided with handouts summarizing the key points from each method of ethical analysis.
Managing Challenging Conversations through Skilled Facilitation (Conflict Management, Part II) (006)
5–7 PM
Speaker: Autumn Fiester, PhD
Cost: $100
The ASBH has long endorsed the facilitation approach as the best model for ethics consultation yet many clinical ethics training programs do not offer skill-based training in this important technique. While mastery of multi-party facilitation is one of the core competencies, many ethics consultants have not been trained in facilitation techniques. Empirical data show that the majority of US clinical ethicists hold group meetings with clinical staff, patients, and families as part of an ethics consult, even though many have not had formal training in group facilitation techniques. Having skill-based knowledge in the approaches to group interaction is especially important when tensions in the group are running high and members of the group are experiencing anger, frustration, burnout, or moral distress. This workshop will provide facilitation foundational training by teaching group management, strategies to manage difficult and contentious conversations among and between the clinical team, family members, and patients, and pitfalls to avoid that can cause a group meeting to fail. In this hands-on workshop, participants will learn how to effectively conducting complex, multi-party, and emotionally charged meetings with a diverse set of stakeholders. Careful attention will be paid to the issue of values-imposition and how to avoid it in consultation. Participants will master advanced facilitation through a combination of didactic presentations, question and response activities, and small group activities.