Reidar Pedersen: The development of clinical ethics support in Norwegian health care

Guest lecture
Modern health care faces numerous ethical dilemmas. Clinical ethics support services have been developed in many countries in the last decades. In 2021 the Norwegian parliament made clinical ethics committees in health care mandatory by law, probably as the first country in the world. In this lecture I will present the development of clinical ethics support in Norway the last 25 years leading up to this law. This will include a brief presentation of the main clinical ethical challenges in the Norwegian health care services the last decades, key measures taken to deal with these ethical challenges, the role of Centre for medical ethics at the University of Oslo, and important future tasks for the field of clinical ethics.

ABOUT REIDAR PEDERSEN
Professor Reidar Pedersen is one of the leading scholars in ethics and communication in health care and have worked with this area since 2003. Among his many fields of expertise are questions concerning informed consent, end of life ethics, advance care planning, resource allocation, coercion and involvement of next of kin, especially in mental health care. His research includes qualitative and quantitative methods, intervention studies, systematic reviews, and theoretical and philosophical analyses, which has resulted in a large number of publications (read more here). In 2010 Pedersen defended his PhD-thesis on empathy in medicine. In 2011 he was promoted to a post as a researcher with professor competence, and since 2015, he has been Professor and Head of the Centre for Medical Ethics. From 2020 an onwards, he also serves as Deputy head of the Institute of Health and Society.

Read more about Pedersen’s academic work here:


This lecture takes place at the DIAS auditorium. The lceture will be livestreamed on our YouTube Channel.