Clinical Ethics Partnership: Good for Patients, Staff and BJC St. Luke’s

August 18, 2026

Blog, What's New

Published on: August 17, 2026

By Trudi Galblum, MPS
Marketing, Communications, & Grantwriting

“I was born with a very serious congenital heart defect and spent a lot of time in and out of the hospital,” said the Rev. Susan Roberts, MDiv, BCC, Senior Manager of Spiritual Wellness at BJC Saint Luke’s (formerly Saint Luke’s Health System). “I am quite fortunate to be 60 years old with my original heart.”

Rev. Roberts traces her passion today for autonomy and justice to her early experiences as a patient, as well as a medical emergency later on when she was treated rudely and made to feel undignified.

Before joining BJC Saint Luke’s in 2019, Rev. Roberts served for 12 years a as a chaplain and co-chair of the Ethics Committee at the University of Utah Health Care, which had an active trauma center. “I was a little bit of a trauma junkie,” she admits.

Ordained by the Episcopal Church in 2015, Rev. Roberts believes she was called to the priesthood to fulfill the promise of her baptismal covenant – to preserve the dignity of every human being.

Chaplains with a Voice

As Senior Manager of Spiritual Wellness, Rev. Roberts’ responsibilities at BJC Saint Luke’s include spiritual wellness,

Portrait of Rev. Susan Roberts.

clinical pastoral education, and the Ethics Committee. When she first arrived, one of her first acts was to restructure the Spiritual Wellness reporting structure and how it relates to the larger health system. Under the old system, chaplain managers reported to the CEOs of the facilities where they worked.

“I felt it would be more beneficial for our chaplains report to a chaplain,” said Rev. Roberts, “so now all managers report directly to me, as well as to the top executive at their hospital. That way, I know what’s going on but they also have a voice within their own entity.”

All ethics consultation cases at BJC Saint Luke’s Hospital come through its Ethics Committee. Rev. Roberts said that the committee responds immediately to two-to-three cases a month, all of which are discussed at the full committee’s quarterly meeting. Under the new structure, Rev. Roberts cochairs the committee with a member of the BJC Saint Luke’s Hospital Board of Directors.

Rev. Roberts oversees nearly 25 chaplains, including five managers, specializing in areas such as obstetrics and NICU, heart transplant evaluation, palliative care, neuro-oncology, pulmonary care, deescalation, and Spanish language.

Clinical Ethics Partnership: Saint Luke’s & CPB

Saint Luke’s Health System, founded in 1882 by an Episcopal priest, recently combined operations with St. Louis-based BJC HealthCare to operate an integrated system across 67 counties in Missouri and Kansas.

But the clinical ethics partnership between Saint Luke’s Health System and the Center for Practical Bioethics (CPB) goes back decades, structured around three pillars:

- Complex Case Navigation – The Center trains and advises medical team members, chaplains and hospital administrators how to handle difficult clinical scenarios, including resource allocation, patient advocacy, and decisions when a patient’s care has reached the limits of medicine.
- Mitigating Moral Distress – The Center’s clinical ethics support helps to reduce legal risks, smooth out discharge planning, and alleviate the moral distress that frequently causes nursing and physician burnout.
- Institutional Alignment – The partnership supports BJC Saint Luke’s organizational vision to serve as a national model for patient advocacy and clinical quality.

Ethics Consultant Helps Mitigate a Daughter’s Loss

“We had a case that involved a gentleman from another country, who had fallen from a ladder and suffered a severe, likely unsurvivable, head injury. The man’s surrogate decision maker was his 20-year old daughter, who was desperate to see her father one last time before he died but lived thousands of miles away in a remote village.

“We had a very robust interdisciplinary meeting to discuss what to do. Some members of the team voiced doubts about the daughter’s truthfulness in her efforts to secure an American visa.

“I was so glad Ryan was at that Ethics Committee meeting. He helped everyone understand the complexity of the case and the importance of moving forward by supporting the daughter. The man did die without his daughter, but we were able, with my chaplain who speaks Spanish, to support her on the phone.”

Rev. Susan Roberts

By coincidence, Rev. Roberts joined BJC Saint Luke’s at nearly the same time in 2019 that Ryan Pferdehirt moved from Tacoma, Washington, where he was a clinical ethicist in MultiCare Health System, to join the Center as Vice President of Ethics Services.

“Before I moved to Kansas City,” said Rev. Roberts, “I didn’t know about the Center and was so impressed that it’s here. Through our partnership with the Center, our chaplains as well as other professionals and students have access to education and relationships with people who share our belief that all humans deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.

“Ryan sits on our Ethics Committee and is almost always available. When I write in the clinical notes that we reviewed a challenging case with members of the Ethics Committee – including the bioethics consultant – that not only underpins our position with the medical team but helps us to better support our patients and providers.

What’s Important

Rev. Roberts enjoys kayaking and photography and would ride horses more often if she had time, she says. Her son Kevin Muller is in nursing school in Salt Lake City. As a clergy couple, she is married to the Rev. Canon Robin James, Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Liberty, Missouri.

As a clergy couple. Rev. Roberts and her wife.

In addition Rev. Roberts’ early life encounters with the healthcare system, she had one other experience that continues to have a significant impact on her approach to patients and pastoral care.

“My mother had vascular dementia and died suddenly of pulmonary emboli in both lungs,” she said. “I know this sounds strange but I was so grateful.

“One, my mom went fast and didn’t suffer. Two, my mom went before she forgot who we were. And three my mom died on Christmas Day.

“People say that must ruin Christmas for you, and I say no because I found a note my mom had written where she said what she wanted for Christmas. She said, ‘I want to see Ken,’ my dad who died in 1992. ‘I want all of my children healthy and well,’ which we were at the time. ‘And I want to have a good Christmas.’ Which she did because she got to see my dad and celebrate Christmas with Jesus!”

As chaplains, the focus for Rev. Roberts and her staff is less on what it takes to preserve a person’s life than what’s important to that person about being alive.