In recent approaches to ethics, the personal involvement of health care providers and their empathy are perceived as important elements of an overall ethical ability. Experiential working methods are used in ethics education to foster, inter alia, empathy. In 2008, the care-ethics lab 'sTimul' was founded in Flanders, Belgium, to provide training that focuses on improving care providers' ethical abilities through experiential working simulations. The curriculum of sTimul focuses on empathy sessions, aimed at care providers' empathic skills. The present study provides better insight into how experiential learning specifically targets the empathic abilities of care providers. Providing contrasting experiences that affect the care providers' self-reflection seems a crucial element in this study. Further research is needed to provide more insight into how empathy leads to long-term changes in behaviour.

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of qualitative research for studying the ethics of care, bringing to light the lived experience of health care recipients, together with the importance of methods that allow reconstruction of the processes underlying this lived experience. Lived experiences of families being approached for organ donation, parents facing the imminent death of their child and patients being treated using stem cell transplantation are used to illustrate how ethical principles are differentiated, modified or contradicted by the narrative context of persons concerned. The integration of empirical data into ethics will help caregivers in their ethical decision making and may enrich care ethics as a narrative and interpretative field.

The paper describes the results of an exploratory study of the application of programme management in six companies. A classification of programmes developed may help in understanding the differences between programmes and the managerial impact of these differences. The research shows that the formalised and rigorous approach as described in most programme management handbooks is not widely adopted. The cases show less centralisation, less formalisation and less management of the interdependencies between the projects in the programme than one would expect on the basis of the programme management literature. This is especially the case in programmes that originate as a grouping of a set of existing projects. Yet, formalisation is mentioned as the main success factor in managing programmes.