1st ICCEC in Cleveland

The inaugural conference in the series, Clinical Ethics Consultation: First International Assessment Summit was organized in Cleveland, Ohio, USA on April 4-6, 2003 with sponsorship by a large group of international societies including the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, Australian-Asian Bioethics Society, Canadian Bioethics Society, European Society for Philosophy of Medicine and Healthcare, European Association of Centers of Medical Ethics, Bioethics Education Network of the International Association of Bioethics, and the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences.

These organizations recognized that although ethics committees and formal ethics consultation services has grown rapidly in North America and spread to Europe and other parts of the world during the last two decades, opportunities for open discussion of challenges involved in ethics consultation and clinical ethics in general have lagged. This conference was an effort to fill this gap.