The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a renewed societal focus on issues related to sickness and death. But how do we best care for the sick and for the dying? How do we appropriately provide palliative care and hospice care?

In the first collaboration between the National Catholic Bioethics Center and the Institute for Human Ecology, listen to a panel discussion, moderated by IHE Director of the M.A. Program in Human Rights William Saunders, J.D., with ethicists Dr. Jozef Zalot (National Catholic Bioethics Center) and Dr. Myles Sheehan (Pellegrino Center for Clinical Ethics; Georgetown Medical School), on the definition and scope of palliative and hospice care from a Catholic perspective.

William Saunders, J.D., is a graduate of the Harvard Law School who has been involved in issues of public policy, law and ethics for thirty years. A regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Mr. Saunders has written widely on these topics, as well as on Catholic social teaching. He has given lectures in law schools and colleges throughout the United States and the world. He is the Director of the M.A. Program in Human Rights for the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America.

Jozef Zalot, Ph.D., joined The National Catholic Bioethics Center as a staff ethicist in July 2017. He served from 2015 to 2017 as the regional director of ethics and spiritual care for Mercy Health–Cincinnati. In this role he chaired the regional ethics committee, offered ethics consultations for both patients and staff, reviewed and drafted ethics policies, and started a nurse ethics education program. During this time, he also served as a lecturer at the Athenaeum of Ohio/Mount St. Mary’s Seminary, where he taught courses in medical ethics and morality and justice in Catholic life. From 2004 to 2015, Dr. Zalot was a tenured professor at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, where he taught courses in health care ethics, business ethics, sexual and reproductive ethics, introduction to Catholic theology, and marriage. Dr. Zalot earned a PhD from Marquette University in 2002, an MEd from Boston College in 1997, an MEd from Springfield College in 1991, and a BA from St. Anselm College in 1989.

Fr. Myles Sheehan, S.J., is a Jesuit priest, physician, and professor of medicine. He joined the Georgetown University Center for Clinical Bioethics and the Georgetown Jesuit Community in January 2020. Fr. Sheehan was ordained as a priest in 1994. For 14 years, Fr. Sheehan worked at Loyola University in Chicago, first as a professor, and eventually as senior associate dean at the Stritch School of Medicine and the Ralph P. Leischner Professor and Chair of the Leischner Institute for Medical Education. He departed Loyola in 2009 to become the Provincial for the New England Province Society of Jesus. In his role as Provincial, Fr. Sheehan was responsible for the care of the 300 Jesuits in New England. In 2015, he became the Provincial Delegate for Senior Jesuits for the Maryland and USA Northeast Provinces of the Society of Jesus, for which he helped supervise the personal care of about 200 Jesuits in four health-care facilities. Fr. Sheehan teaches Catholic Clinical Ethics and serves on the ethics consultation service and ethics committee at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. He holds an M.D. from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and a B.A. from Dartmouth College.