The main question examined is: How do nurses and other healthcare professionals ensure ethical interprofessional collaboration-in-practice as an everyday practice actuality? Ethical interprofessional collaboration becomes especially relevant and necessary when interprofessional practice decisions are contested. To illustrate, two healthcare scenarios are analyzed through three ethics lenses. Biomedical ethics, relational ethics, and virtue ethics provide different ways of knowing how to be ethical and to act ethically as healthcare professionals. Biomedical ethics focuses on situated, reflective, and nonabsolute principled justification, all things (...) considered; relational ethics on intersubjective, professional, and institutional relations; and virtue ethics on prephilosophical tradition and what it means to be good and to be human embedded in social and political community. Analysis suggests that interprofessional collaboration-in-practice may be more rhetoric than actuality. Key challenges of interprofessional collaboration-in-practice and specific conditions perpetuating dissension and conflict are outlined with specific education and policy recommendations included. (shrink)

This paper discusses the importance of Richard M. Zaners work on clinical ethics for answering the question: what kind of doing is ethics consultation? The paper argues first, that four common approaches to clinical ethics – applied ethics, casuistry, principlism, and conflict resolution – cannot adequately address the nature of the activity that makes up clinical ethics; second, that understanding the practical character of clinical ethics is critically important for the field; and third, that the practice of clinical ethics is (...) bound up with the normative commitments of medicine as a therapeutic enterprise. (shrink)