Attending to Trauma, Balancing Power, and Prioritizing Stakeholders in Ethics Consultation

AbstractClinical ethicists ought to account for stakeholder traumas while finding an acceptable balance between competing obligations and responsibilities. Among these is the ethical responsibility to avoid unnecessary suffering that can occur if the decision-making process is prolonged when accounting for the past and present traumas of patients, healthcare team members, and surrogate decision makers (SDMs). Autumn Fiester makes a radical proposal to prioritize avoidance of SDM retraumatization, suggesting that current ethics consultation best practices fall short of standards in trauma-informed approaches. We respond to Fiester and argue that current best practices in ethics consultation already support creating space to identify stakeholder traumas and integrate them into the decision-making process, which sufficiently fulfills an ethics consultant's responsibility to implement trauma-informed practices. Fiester's proposal of prioritizing SDMs, even when this risks violating a patient's bodily dignity, falls back on a traditional view of prioritizing a power structure of those who are related to a patient by genetics or by law. Ethics consultants should flexibly negotiate all stakeholder perspectives to avoid unnecessary retraumatization and to prioritize stakeholders, depending on the specific ethical issues and context.