Personal Consultations Case Study Database

The National Catholic Bioethics Center invites professors and mission integration officers to take advantage of a new initiative of the Personal Consultations Department: real-life case studies for use primarily in university courses and professional training.

The NCBC is developing and maintaining a database of anonymized case studies from ethics consultation requests. The use of real-world cases helps students improve their listening, critical thinking skills, and appreciation for patients’ experiences. This initiative can fill a gap in many curricula and aims to enhance authentically Catholic medical-moral training. New cases will be added periodically to ensure that students are exposed to a wide range of scenarios.

Every anonymized case study in our database has been included with explicit permission from the person who submitted the original consultation request. These individuals also participated in the process of developing the case studies.

We received explicit permission from participants to share their de-identified consultation questions only with educators involved in higher education or professional training. If you do not intend to use the case studies for either of these purposes, we invite you to use the collection of case studies from the revised third edition of Handbook on Critical Life Issues by John Leies as well as the research-related case studies in A Catholic Guide to Ethical Clinical Research by The Catholic Medical Association and the NCBC. (Visit our store for the full volume. For bulk orders, contact us by email [orders@ncbcenter.org] or phone [215-871-2011].) Additionally, we have an extensive collection of free online resources, and both the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly and Ethics & Medics published free-to-access articles that should be helpful for classroom discussion. Articles published within the past five years are accessible with a subscription to the NCBQ and E&M.

“We’ve been using these in class, and everyone loves them. They are so helpful for the students—especially in that they know these are real questions. Thank you so much for the work you’ve been doing. It’s fantastic!”

David Echelbarger
University of Mary
Bismarck, ND

Fill out this form to request access to the database.