Evaluating Ethics Quality in Health Care Organizations: Looking Back and Looking Forward

Abstract

To spark a conversation about how best to evaluate ethics quality, this article draws on the collective experience of the IntegratedEthicsTM evaluation team to reflect on what we have learned and to envision an agenda for future work. The article emphasizes the importance of beginning with a well-defined conceptual model, building an expert team, committing the resources necessary to do evaluation well, and tailoring the evaluation methods to the target audience. The article then describes a five-point agenda for future work on ethics quality in health care: further evaluate and improve ethics programs; further evaluate and improve specific ethical practices; examine the relationships among various aspects of ethics quality; examine the relationships between ethics quality and other important organizational outcomes; and foster cross-institutional collaborations to evaluate and improve ethics quality. The hope is that some day ethics will be fully integrated into the mainstream of health care quality management.