Minnesota Center for Health Care Ethics

The Minnesota Center for Health Care Ethics serves the community through health care ethics leadership, service, education, and scholarship.

Since its founding nineteen years ago, the Minnesota Center for Health Care Ethics has grown and prospered through its symbiotic relationship with its three Sponsors—Fairview Health Services, HealthEast Care System and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, St. Paul Province—and their shared commitment to social justice.

The Minnesota Center for Health Care Ethics promotes ethically informed health care decision making, from the bedside to the boardroom, from patient care to public policy.

Its mission is to:

• assist patients, families, health care professionals, students, educators, administrators, and policy makers in ethically informed decision making
• generate and communicate ethical concepts, principles, and frameworks
• explore the perspectives that diverse faith and cultural traditions bring to health care decision making
• promote health care ethics education in clinical and academic settings
• make scholarly contributions to the fields of health care ethics and policy

Its vision is to foster community-wide solutions to ethical and policy quandaries in health care through collaborations of scholars, providers, health plans, advocates, spiritual leaders, and policy makers.

Community Collaboration

Collaboration is the defining strategy behind the Center’s work. Since its founding, the Center has worked with and in communities to assure involvement of key stakeholders and responsiveness tocommunity concerns. It partners with hospitals, clinics, academic institutions, professional organizations, government agencies, private industry, and civic and community groups. It engages professionals from diverse disciplines as well as the general public. Its work extends beyond the confines of the state and region to national and international spheres of influence. 

Patient and Public Engagement

Long a method embraced by the Center, public engagement under its many guises (patient engagement, deliberative democracy, community engagement and stakeholder engagement) has become one of the more visible tools in the Center’s collaborative toolbox.