Personal information
Bert (Albert Christiaan) Molewijk (1966) is Assistant Professor of moral deliberation and clinical ethics. He works at the Department of Medical Humanities of the VU Medical Center in Amsterdam as senior researcher and program director Moral Deliberation. He also works 50% as Associate Professor of clinical ethics at the Center for Medical Ethics (SME) at the University of Oslo (UIO) in Norway.
Background
He studied Mental Health Care Nursing (RN) and Health Care Ethics (MA). His PhD thesis ('Risky Business. Individualised Evidence-Based Decision Support and the Ideal of Patient Autonomy. An Integrated Empirical Ethics Study') consisted of a multidisciplinary study on the implicit normativity of the constructing, presentation and communication of scientific facts, and was supported by the Programme Ethics and Policies of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). His postdoc (also supported by NWO) dealt with the implicit normativity of technological artefacts. His MA thesis was on the goals of medicine at the Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) and he was a visiting scholar at the Hastings Center in New York on grassrootsbioethics.
Current activities
Since September 2003 he is working as researcher, trainer and manager on Clinical Moral Deliberation projects (first at Maastricht University and since March 2009 at VUmc). As ethicist, he is a member of Health Ethics Committees in elderly care, mentally handicapped care and a general hospital. He co-founded the Dutch network for Clinical Moral Deliberation: ‘Platform Moreel Beraad’ (hosted by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS)) and the European Network for Clinical Moral Deliberation: ECEN (hosted at the VUmc). He is an advisory board member of the journal Clinical Ethics and a member of the advisory board of the National Center for Ethics and Health Care (CEG). He recently co-edited thematic issues on empirical ethics (Bioethics), clinical ethics consultation (Bioethics) and moral deliberation (Tijdschrift voor Gezondheid en Ethiek). He published several papers on theory, practice and training of moral deliberation in particular and clinical ethics and empirical ethics in general (see 'publications').
His main interests are in the field of clinical ethics and empirical ethics, such as: practice, training and research of method & theory of moral deliberation; moral epistemology; training and consulting health care professionals & institutions; moral competence; moral expertise.