Clinical Ethics Needs Assessment: Adapting Clinical Ethics to a Population Health Program

The clinical encounter between providers and patients is insufficient: most factors influencing health outcomes occur outside the clinic. Community Health Needs Assessments address this insufficiency via collaboration between hospitals and the communities they serve to address systemic sociological-economic variables impacting health outcomes. Considering this, why are Health Care Ethics Consultation (HCEC) services limited to the clinical setting? We can cultivate better ethics outcomes by addressing systemic sociological-economic factors that cause recurring ethics issues in the hospital. In this article, I argue for the need for a Community Ethics Needs Assessment (CENA). CENA is a novel concept; thus, this article is exploratory. I argue for the necessity of a CENA and, more importantly, outline what methodology a CENA would use to both identify and address an ethics need.