Ethical thinking and practice in the healthcare professions

Every aspect of what healthcare professionals do for patients is ethically significant, so it might seem strange that, when healthcare professionals are asked if anything ethically significant has occurred, their answer frequently is: "No, there were no ethical issues here." But this answer does not mean that nothing ethically significant occurred during their caregiving. For healthcare professionals attend to the ethical content of their caregiving so routinely, so habitually, that their doing this is rarely thought of as involving a method of ethical reflection. This essay will examine this kind of ethical reflection in detail: its main components, how it works in practice, and how to grow in doing it effectively.