When Healthcare Providers and Patient Families Disagree

Bioethics for the People

Kevin Dirksen, senior director of the Providence Center for Health Care Ethics, brings a haunting clinical ethics case that highlights the complexity of navigating disagreements between patients, family members, and the healthcare team.

Kevin Dirksen is senior director of the Providence Center for Health Care Ethics and the Andy & Bev Honzel Endowed Chair in Applied Health Care Ethics. His role includes working with the internal medicine and family medicine residency programs in ethics education, as well as providing clinical and organizational ethics consultation throughout the Oregon Region of Providence St. Joseph Health. In addition to day-to-day oversight of the Center, its team, and its operations, Kevin engages in clinical ethics research and scholarship: representing the work of the Center in professional publications and conferences.

Kevin has published in international, peer-reviewed publications on topics including decision-making capacity, clinical ethics consultation, end-of-life care, scarce resource allocation, and public health ethics. He has lectured on a range of ethical topics in patient care and health policy and has presented at national and international conferences.

Kevin holds an advanced graduate degree in biomedical ethics and a professional graduate degree in theology, specializing in ethics and health. He completed two years of clinical training in health care ethics at the UCLA Health Ethics Center as the Arny & Anne Porath Clinical Ethics Fellow and Senior Clinical Ethics Fellow. He has also earned the Healthcare Ethics Consultant Certification designation from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities’ Health Care Ethics Consultation (HCEC) Certification Commission.

A native to the Pacific Northwest, Kevin and his wife now live in their hometown with their four children. For fun, Kevin excels at stumbling through D-I-Y house projects, watching Seattle Mariners baseball, and reading classics with his children.

Read More from Kevin Dirksen:

• Joseph W. Kaempf & Kevin M. Dirksen (2022) The Birth of Tragedy? Extremely Premature Births and Shared Decision-Making, The American Journal of Bioethics, 22:11, 59-66, DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2022.2123981

• Kevin M. Dirksen, Joseph W. Kaempf & Nicholas J. Kockler (2020) Periviability in a Pandemic: Good Ethics Still Considered Essential, The American Journal of Bioethics, 20:7, 177-180, DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2020.1779394

• Carol Pavlish, Katherine Brown-Saltzman, Kevin M. Dirksen & Alyssa Fine (2015) Physicians’ Perspectives on Ethically Challenging Situations: Early Identification and Action, AJOB Empirical Bioethics, 6:3, 28-40, DOI: 10.1080/23294515.2014.972527

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