We consider the concept of ‘practising’ to set us apart from others who call themselves ethicists, bioethicists, or medical ethicists. While our work involves similar academic thinking, teaching and writing, our everyday practice is focused on supporting complex decisions by and about real people in real healthcare contexts - in contrast to those whose work is primarily academic without the day to day experience of practice.

We define the overall scope of our practice this way:

Practising Healthcare Ethicists (PHEs) facilitate the identifying, understanding, analyzing, and navigating of ethical and values-based concerns, uncertainties, and conflicts arising in healthcare, healthcare-related services, and the conduct of health-related research.

We use the following definition to describe a PHE to distinguish ourselves as based in the context of an organization providing specific individuals and groups with healthcare services:

A Practising Healthcare Ethicist (PHE) has completed relevant graduate-level education and has dedicated work responsibilities within a healthcare organization to provide a variety of ethics-related services which include a majority of the following:

• clinical and/or organizational ethics consultation;

• policy development and/or review;

• ethics education for staff;

• management of and/or provision of subject matter expertise to institutional ethics programs (including clinical ethics committees and accreditation support);

• mentoring of staff/learners;

• research ethics consultation;

• ethics scholarship & research; and/or

• services to the profession.

[Adapted from Simpson, C. Getting Engaged: Exploring Professionalization in Canada. HEC Forum 24, 149–151 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-012-9191-z ]

As noted above, this definition is not intended to include those whose primary ethics-related responsibilities are academic or scholarly work and/or involvement with research ethics boards.