Healthcare Ethics Consortium 2026 Annual Conference

I have been fortunate to participate several times in Emory's  Healthcare Ethics Consortium Annual Conference.

This year's conference (on March 23-24, 2026) will pair speaking sessions with hands-on skill-building workshops where they will dive deeply into the power of sharing and understanding narratives to build trust and empathy, enhance effective patient care, better support vulnerable patients, and mitigate burnout in healthcare professionals.  After attending these sessions, participants will be able to: 

• Discuss the importance of exploring stories of healthcare professionals and patients/families as “whole persons”
• Identify elements of these stories that are selected (or neglected) in the ways in which we tell these narratives to others
• Apply narrative practices that promote self-awareness and trust within clinical relationships
• Describe narratives – of patients and themselves – in order to better navigate the realities and ethical tensions of everyday healthcare and improve delivery of humanistic care
• Apply narrative and conflict management tools to address clinical concerns such as conflicting perspectives of surrogate decision makers and continuing treatment that some team members believe is non-beneficial and ethically inappropriate