Medical Center Hour ‘Welcome: Patterns of Ethical Healthcare’

In this presentation, Margaret Mohrmann and Lois Shepherd introduce their ground-breaking work on an ethics of welcome and describe the practices and perspectives essential to being a welcoming health care professional. Drawing on their recent book, Welcome: Patterns of the Moral Life, Mohrmann and Shepherd explain why and how welcome matters in health care practice and how we can get better at doing it. Welcoming, they claim, is in fact the primary move of ethics that enables further ethical deliberation to remain anchored in the lived reality of the persons involved. Compelling stories demonstrate both the effects of welcome and the consequences of its absence and illuminate the obligation of welcome as it applies not only to individuals but to communities small and large, to institutions and organizations, including health care systems.

This presentation explores welcome’s defining attributes of openness, attention, and responsiveness, and offers a variety of welcoming perspectives and practices, including “nesting,” in which being welcomed enables and encourages persons to be more welcoming themselves.

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