The Ethics Ambassador Program: A Grassroots Approach

The Ethics Ambassador program at the University of Colorado Hospital was born from a desire to encourage earlier ethics consultation, with the goal of providing timely, effective, and patient-centered ethics support. The selected Ethics Ambassadors are individuals from multiple roles across the hospital who receive regular education to serve as an ethics resource for their respective units or specialties. As embedded individuals, they are better able to recognize the unique needs and challenges of their units and provide relevant ethics education to staff and faculty. Outcomes of the first year of the program illustrated the diverse ethics needs across the hospital and the benefits of utilizing embedded individuals, able to straddle both the domains of ethics and the needs of their individual units.