Community Bioethics Forum

The Community Bioethics Forum was developed within the Program for Biomedical Ethics at Yale School of Medicine, in collaboration with the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, to serve as a resource to both institutional and public policymakers.  The Forum is charged with inviting the community’s voice into the dialogue of ethics within institutional healthcare settings and governmental policy and law.    These community narratives then often shape national surveys to explore whether local trends are reflective of a wider audience (such as the CBF’s recent work shaping consent laws).

The Forum is comprised of volunteer members within the State of CT. Forum members are not medical ethicists or doctors, rather they are members of the public who understand patients’ needs and values, and who reflect the community’s rich diversity of cultures and perspectives. Twenty men and women serve on the Forum and their ages range from the twenties to the seventies. Forum members participate in many faith traditions, including Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and Unitarianism, and some describe themselves as agnostic or unaffiliated. Our Christian members are Baptist, Methodist, and Roman Catholic.  Some members do not have a high school diploma; others have advanced degrees. Members speak many languages including Spanish and Chinese; describe themselves as African-American, Hispanic, and white; one member was born outside the United States, and another member’s parents are first-generation Americans.

Forum members are employed in a wide range of professions. Membership includes a director of an HIV/AIDS skilled nursing facility, an operations director of a New Haven community health center, a professional writer, a hospice administrator, a technologist and inventor, a small business owner, an attorney representing the elderly and disabled, another attorney who serves as a guardian-ad-litem for children in need, and a local alderman. Notably, to minimize conflict-of-interest, no members are  employees of Yale University or a hospital system. Members have volunteered overseas (as a medical clinic aide and a Peace Corps Volunteer) and locally (as chaplains, church choir members, park clean-up crew, and literacy volunteers in the school system).  Some members have spent time living in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Ecuador. One member served on the board of directors of a Native American community center, and another served as council for a statewide rehabilitation association. Illness and death have touched all of our lives, and some of us have disabilities.

Solicitation for membership on the Forum is cast widely through community, business, and church groups to promote the selection of a diverse and effective working group.   As preparation for Forum discussion and deliberation, members of the Forum have been given specific training in the area of bioethics. That training includes a review of the history of bioethics (including bioethical issues arising during the Nuremberg Trials and Tuskegee, and more recent studies by the President’s Commission on Bioethics), a review of basic bioethics principles (including the concepts of autonomy and informed consent), the basics of policy analysis, and case study discussions.

Forum members have agreed to spend 3-5 hours before each monthly meeting completing reading assignments which may be from popular media, academic journals, or publications from bioethics research centers such as the Hastings Center Report. Forum meetings are comprised of presentations by bioethicists, nurses, or physicians from the medical community, leaders in CT’s Departments of Public Health and Disability Services, and may sometimes also include presentations by former patients. Presentations are followed by thoughtful discussions and debriefings. The Forum Chair documents member feedback and does not seek to bring the group to one uniform opinion, rather to enable each member to understand the issue and document the group’s informed (and often nuanced) perspectives.

The Forum is a collaboration with Mark Mercurio, MD, MA, Director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics at Yale School of Medicine. The Forum was conceived and is chaired by Lori Bruce, Associate Director of Yale University’s Summer Institute in Bioethics at Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. For additional information on the group, or to discuss a potential consult, please contact Lori at Lori.Bruce@yale.edu

The CBF is modeled after the Community Ethics Committee paradigm developed by our colleague, Carol Powers, at Harvard Medical School.

Examples of Previous Consults:

Last Updated: 2022