Services

The Minnesota Center provides leadership in health care ethics for its sponsoring organizations, the communities they serve, as well as other local and national organizations. Staff are active members of clinical and organizational ethics committees, institutional review boards (IRBs), as well as various task forces and working groups. They participate in ethics consultations, assist with policy development, develop conferences and lecture series, lead community forums, and offer formal presentations to a wide variety of professional and community audiences. They have convened a regional network for organizational ethics resources.

Topics

• cross-cultural health care ethics
• improving relationships between Western health care professionals and Hmong families
• managed care
• organizational ethics
• improving access to health care
• complementary medicine
• coverage for unproved interventions
• withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment
• advance care planning
• rationing scarce life-saving resources
• definitions of death and persistent vegetative state
• increasing the supply of organs and tissues for transplant
• umbilical cord-blood banking
• stem cell donation
• placebo-controlled studies of surgical interventions

The Minnesota Center for Health Care Ethics was founded in 1994 by a consortium of health care and academic organizations:

• Fairview Health Services
• HealthEast Care System
• Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet
• College of St. Catherine

United by their commitments to social justice, these four Minneapolis–St. Paul organizations created the Minnesota Center to enrich reflection on the ethical dimensions of clinical and health policy decision making.The taproot of the Center is the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, who in the mid-1800s began developing extensive health care and educational ministries in the Twin Cities and around the world. In 1853 they founded a hospital in what is now Fairview Health Services; in 1887 they founded a hospital in what is now HealthEast Care System; and in 1905 they founded the College of St. Catherine.

Mission

The Minnesota Center for Health Care Ethics promotes ethically informed, health care decisionmaking, 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 decisionmaking
• generate and communicate ethical concepts, principles, and frameworks
• explore the perspectives that diverse faith and cultural traditions bring to health care decisionmaking
• promote health care ethics education in clinical and academic settings
• make scholarly contributions to the fields of health care ethics and policy

Annual reports

• 2007
• 2006
• 2005