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Panel Presentation

Education/Interprofessionalism

A Review of the First 14 Years of a Novel Pediatric Bioethics Certificate Program for Interdisciplinary Pediatric Healthcare Professionals

Friday, October 24, 2025
10:45 AM - 11:45 AM Pacific Time
Location: A105
Abstract: Interdisciplinary pediatric healthcare professionals (IPHPs) increasingly receive specialty and role-specific bioethics training, but it is limited by time constraints and availability and access to bioethics experts. Bioethics education can help ethics consultants and other IPHPs address ethical dilemmas and mitigate moral distress.

To address the growing need for pediatrics-specific bioethics education, we developed a certificate program in 2011. We have trained over 350 students in medicine, nursing, law, social work, chaplaincy, and other disciplines representing 28 countries, private and public hospitals, labs, and the public health sector.

The moderator will explain how pediatric bioethics is unique, requires and deserves its own space, and a toolbox independent of familiar frameworks and theories that dominate adult bioethics.

The first speaker will discuss our flexible learning approach and results from our recent survey of course alumni. The course uses a blended learning format including in-person and hybrid opening and closing sessions and a robust syllabus of discussion topics covering policy, clinical, and research ethics. This syllabus pairs with asynchronous weekly online discussions of ethics fundamentals discussions, clinical topics, and critical case analysis, and program-specific webinars.

The second speaker will discuss how engaging international students with diverse roles, backgrounds, and experiences, around complex ethical situations as healthcare professionals enhanced discussions with pluralistic perspectives and values.

The third speaker will discuss the required capstone project, highlighting diverse and impactful projects by our students and mentoring faculty from early brainstorming ideas to completion of scholarly works leading to presentations, publications, and local service capacity.

Keywords: Pediatric Bioethics, Interprofessional Ethics Education, Bioethics Scholarship

Learning Objectives:

After participating in this conference, attendees should be able to:
  • Explore approaches to pediatric bioethics education utilizing interprofessional dialogue, and more broadly, multi-role dialogue that includes the voices of patients, families, and clinicians via a national and international lens.
  • Discuss how effective pediatric bioethics curricula must balance timeless, perennial, and foundational topics with openness to ever-evolving issues driven by dynamic clinical, social, political, economic, cultural, research, and technological contexts.
  • Examine how effective pedagogy in pediatric bioethics for health care professionals can be dialogic and didactic while blending multiple approaches to engage adult learners with busy personal and professional lives.