ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to help healthcare staff to reflect on their personal values and moral perspectives which influence both personal and communal practice. This moral dimension of humanity significantly informs our identity – our sense of who we are. Former healthcare chaplain David Lyall suggests that there is no such thing as 'value-free' counselling. The provision of other aspects of healthcare, including spiritual care and ethical decision making, is similarly value-laden. In this chapter, the authors passionately believe that deepening self-awareness is a significant ongoing activity in the promotion of best practice in spiritual care delivery and also in bioethical decision making. For healthcare practitioners this means seeking what they consider best for a patient according to their clinical acumen, reflected experience and knowledge. In contemporary healthcare, consideration of the allocation of available resources has become an increasingly contentious issue.
