Christine Mitchell

She is known for her role in shaping the field in clinical ethics consultations for morally difficult issues in hospital settings. She is a founding member of the American Society for Bioethics Consultation, on which she currently serves, and American Society for Bioethics and Humanities’s Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs standing committee, and most recently, the Ethics Advisory Board of the Human Brain Project's Ethics and Society Subproject, funded by the European Commission. She is a former president of the American Society for Law, Medicine, and Ethics, where she serves on the Editorial Board of its journal, and the Freedom from Cancer Challenge, where she is a project Advisor.

Center for Bioethics Mitchell has been involved in ethics work at Boston Children’s Hospital, where she founded the hospital’s ethics program, directed the hospital’s ethics consultation service, and led its Ethics Advisory Committee for thirty years. She has provided ethics consultation at Massachusetts General Hospital, Baystate Medical Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, North Shore Medical Center in Salem, Massachusetts, and Maine Medical Center.

In 2018, she was elected Vice President of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors,

Since 2002, Mitchell has edited ethics cases for The Journal of Clinical Ethics, where she has been on the Editorial Board since 1989 and is currently its Associate Editor. She lectures outside Harvard on clinical ethics issues In 2009, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities formed the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs standing committee (CECA) in order to address growing concerns that those providing clinical ethics consultation (CEC) were unqualified.

Mitchell's first ethics media was an instructional interactive computer videodisc in 1990, Nursing Ethics and Law, which she produced with two collaborators.

With filmmaker Ben Achtenberg (with whom she has worked for over 26 years, and sometimes with others) she has produced six documentary videos. She was an associate producer of "Code Gray: Ethical Dilemmas in Nursing", a documentary film, which was nominated for (but not awarded) an Academy Award in 1984; their 2002 video, Stanley, about ethical decisions in caring for a patient with end stage kidney failure, was part of a 3-film documentary series and awarded a 2004 Freddie award for medical media. Their 2003 video, Everyday Choices, concerned a visiting nurse and an elderly patient facing ethical questions about waning capacities and independence.

Christine I. Mitchell (born December 8, 1951) is an American filmmaker and bioethicist and the executive director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School (HMS).

She is a clinical practice team member of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, which produced A Blueprint for 21st Century Nursing Ethics: Report of the National Nursing Summit. She is a member of the advisory committee for the Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education, which produces and publishes Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. She also is an Advisory Board member of the Neuroethics Network (Paris).