In a healthcare environment marked by time pressure, complex situations, and significant responsibility, ethical stress can arise. Healthcare professionals often face decisions where every option has consequences, both for the patient and for their own integrity. Creating space for joint reflection is therefore crucial—not only to make informed and confident decisions, but also to safeguard people’s well-being and professional sustainability.
Ethics rounds, or Moral Case Deliberation (MCD), are an established method to support this kind of reflection. An ethics round consists of a structured, interdisciplinary conversation led by an ethics facilitator. The focus is on active listening, withholding immediate judgments, and collectively identifying values.
The goal is not to determine right or wrong, but to reach an ethically grounded decision in situations where every choice involves trade-offs.
The method is based on dialogical ethics, rooted in Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. Ethics is understood as context-dependent and interpretive rather than rule-based, emphasizing open, equal dialogue instead of ready-made solutions.
MCD has been successfully used in the Netherlands since the 1980s–1990s, where it has become a natural part of healthcare work on ethics, quality, and the work environment.
Do you want to strengthen ethical reflection in your organization?
We offer facilitated ethics rounds to support teams facing everyday ethical challenges. Our facilitators help your team create safety, structure, and depth in conversations, aiming to reduce ethical stress and improve decision-making quality.
