Fordham professor Laura Specker Sullivan is collaborating with Montefiore’s Center for Bioethics to serve the Bronx community. Their project aims to develop community trust and involve members in the hospital’s clinical ethics program. Its goal is to reshape Montefiore’s ethics program to ensure that Montefiore clinical ethicists best serve their patients through consultations and ethical advice.

“Not all of the clinical ethicists at Montefiore live in the Bronx,” said Sullivan, associate professor of philosophy and head of the project. “So there’s this question of the extent to which clinical ethics services are able to, kind of, understand and reflect the needs of the communities they’re serving.”

Specker Sullivan has worked with Montefiore since she started at Fordham in 2020. She is part of both their bioethics committee and ethics review committee. Specker Sullivan has also been connecting Fordham students with internships in Montefiore’s clinical ethics center since 2021. 

Currently she is partnering with Montefiore to ensure that the hospital’s clinical ethics program reflects the needs of the Bronx community by engaging the community with clinical ethics. The overall goal of the project is to develop community trust with Montefiore and to better serve the Bronx community through ethics consultations.

Clinical ethics is a specialized consultation service present at most academic medical centers. The service involves a group of ethics consultants who help patients with ethical issues. According to Specker Sullivan, ethical issues tend to regard end-of-life care and decision-making. Through this project, Specker Sullivan hopes to improve Montefiore’s current clinical ethics consultation program so that Bronx community members can better benefit from it.

“Our hope is that it will make the clinical ethics service a service for members of the Bronx community that they feel like is for them, meets their needs, that they can have involvement in, that they’re comfortable asking questions of,” Specker Sullivan said.

The project will be modeled after another ethics center at Temple University in Philadelphia. Their ethics center focuses on community engagement and works on developing community trust in order to reflect the needs and interests of individuals in the community. 

The Montefiore project is in the preliminary stages, but members of the project have been working on it since September. According to Specker Sullivan, they have so far interviewed members of Temple University’s ethics program to get ideas for their own program, learned how to conduct a needs assessment and started volunteering in the Bronx community in order to get a better understanding of how people in the community live and work.

The project will start taking off next fall when they conduct a needs assessment in the Bronx, which will ask people about their experience with Montefiore’s clinical ethics services and their awareness of it. The needs assessment will also gauge what issues Bronx citizens feel are important or need to be addressed and will be distributed to community members through community partners, such as Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, as well as at locations such as food banks, farmers markets, libraries and churches.

“ It’s really just trying to find out what the community’s ethics needs are so that the clinical ethics service can position itself to better meet those needs,” Specker Sullivan said.