Dear colleagues:
It is the fourth time that we, as founders of the International Conference of Clinical Ethics and Consultation series (ICCEC), are able to invite you to participate in a meeting of the growing community of clinical ethics. The 4th International Conference on Clinical Ethics and Consultation is being held in conjunction with the 9th World Congress of Bioethics, Rijeka, Croatia. We appreciate the opportunity to invite a larger audience of bioethics to join the ICCEC for enriching discourse and intercultural discussion.

The first Conference was held in 2003, Cleveland, Ohio, the second took place in 2005, Basel, Switzerland, and the third in 2007, Toronto. In these meetings, we have been reassured that there is continuing interest and need to exchange experiences, questions, and approaches to improving clinical ethics and ethics consultation in health care. We have found that workers in the field of clinical ethics and ethics consultation are committed to improving the quality of patient care and professional relationships. Even in times when health care and university budgets are restricted, you are finding ways to continue developing or expanding clinical ethics support services.

The program of the fourth conference will focus on the challenges that exist in new and expanding clinical ethics and ethics consultation programs. Challenges and conflicts posed by differences in the perspectives of patients or families and the perspectives of health care providers are complicated by tensions introduced because of cultural, ethnic, or religious differences. These concerns, so important for clinical ethics and ethics consultation, mesh well with the overall theme of the 9th World Congress of Bioethics. We expect that this conference, like its predecessors, will address ongoing educational needs in the clinical ethics community and allow for a lively exchange on "how-to questions." Along with these practical concerns, there will be ample room for conceptual and research perspectives.
We look forward to your participation and hope that you will be able to join us in September
2008.

The 2010 conference will be in Portland Oregon, hosted by the Providence Center for Health Care Ethics in Portland, Oregon. Their homepage is: www.providence.org/ethics.


Sincerely yours,


Stella Reiter-Theil, Ph.D, Dipl.-Psych.
Professor of Medical Ethics
Director, Institute for Applied Ethics
and Medical Ethics
University of Basel, Switzerland


George J. Agich, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy
Director, BGeXperience Program
Bowling Green State University, Ohio