Developing Organisational Diversity Statements through Dialogical Clinical Ethics Support: The Role of the Clinical Ethicist

"In increasingly pluralist societies, stakeholders in healthcare do not always share a common moral perspective on health, wellbeing or good care. Growing cultural, religious, and sexual diversity among both patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs) require healthcare organizations to address these differences and to engage in inclusive and equitable practices. Addressing diversity, however, comes with inherent moral challenges. For example, regarding how to deal with healthcare disparities between minoritized and majoritized patients. Additionally, increasing diversity in the workforce means that HCPs moral perspectives on ‘good care’ are diversifying. Developing diversity statements is an important strategy for healthcare organizations to define their normative ideas, values, and approaches to both care and diversity. To tackle concerns of exclusion and power differences, and to ensure that these statements reflect a common ground among HCPs, healthcare organizations ought to develop diversity statements in an inclusive and participatory way. Clinical ethics support (CES) services and interventions such as Socratic Dialogues can be employed to help healthcare organizations to do so. In this presentation, we (1) argue for taking a participatory approach when supporting healthcare organisations in developing diversity statements, (2) report both on the content and the process of developing a diversity statement through CES and Socratic Dialogues, and (3) maintain that CES that supports processes of joint reflection and learning among stakeholders can be used in such an approach. We will use a case example from practice to illustrate our point. We conclude with several recommendations regarding a participatory CES approach for developing diversity statements. "