Chapter 7: Mindful Practice and the Tacit Ethics of the Moment

One way of defining the character of clinicians is to examine their moment-to-moment actions during the course of clinical care. These small actions, cumulatively, describe the clinician as a practitioner and moral agent. In this chapter, using clinical examples, I explore the possibility that professional competence and virtue are based, in part, on clinicians’ ability to engage in a “mindful” practice in which they can be attentive to their own actions, curious enough to examine them and present and flexible enough to change them.