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Objectives: To describe how ethics is practised in a health care setting, and to ascertain whether there was interest in establishing clinical ethics support services.

Design and setting: Observations and interviews undertaken between April and November 2012 in a large NSW urban hospital with newborn care, maternity and oncology departments and analysed by coding and categorising the data.

Main outcome measures: Key themes in the participants' attitudes to professional ethics were identified.

Results: Ethics is not typically an explicit feature of clinical deliberations, and clinicians tend to apply basic ethical principles when ethical problems are identified. They also discuss difficult decisions with colleagues, and try to resolve ethical differences by discussion. Participants judged the ethics of clinical practice to be “mostly right”, primarily because ethics is “part of the fabric” of everyday clinical work that aspires to …