Mission & Goals

Mission

The mission of the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics is to address the dehumanization of healthcare and to focus on bioethics and social problems in medicine. We bring humanities and ethics to students in order to enhance their own humanity and equip them with tools for problem-solving and personal development. We publish scholarship in pursuit of these and other intellectual goals.

Goals

Since our founding in 2004, the McGovern Center has filled a unique and important gap in medical school and health professional education. Today, we strive to:

• Strengthen the medical profession’s tradition of service, integrity, and compassionate care;
• Aid students, residents, and faculty in developing a humane professionalism that guides and sustains their work;
• Encourage respect and collaboration among different professions on the health care team;
• Engage in research on human values and spiritual growth in educating health professionals to care for patients and to promote public health;
• Create a national model that guides other academic health centers in developing programs for students’ moral and spiritual growth, and for collaborative and compassionate care; and
• Create programs that assist health care organizations in building meaning-centered work for all employees by linking individual growth to organizational change.