[4] Dubler's first jobs after law school included positions at South Brooklyn Legal Services, the Vera Institute of Justice, and Bank Street College of Education.
[5] In 1975, Dubler joined Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine as Director of the Division of Legal and Ethical Issues in Health Care, where she remained until 2008.
Dubler founded Montefiore's Bioethics Consultation Service in 1978,[1] bringing a multi-disciplinary approach to assist patients, families and providers with difficult health care decisions and dispute resolution.
[6] Dubler described the ethics consult service in her 1992 book, Ethics on Call: Taking Charge of Life-and-Death Choices in Today's Health Care System,[3] co-authored with David Nimmons: "We sit with doctors and nurses, discuss and ask questions to clarify the issues, propose different ways to think about the situation, highlight the patients' rights, and work to give the tools they need to deal with patients and families.
[8] Over time Dubler increasingly argued that the techniques of mediation were the best way to balance the differing views of those faced with challenging medical decisions.
She notes the challenge of balancing among three competing factors: limits imposed by law on medical professionals and institutions, the decision-making authority of patients and families, and power imbalances in modern hospitals.
[15] Notably, Dubler served for many years as a member of the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law and contributed significantly to, among other work, Task Force reports on genetic testing and screening (2000);[16] research with human subjects who lack capacity (2014);[17] allocation of ventilators in a pandemic (2015);[18] extending New York's Family Health Care Decisions Act to other settings and populations (2016);[19] and legalizing gestational surrogacy (2016).
Much of her written work calls for improvements in public policies on such matters as end-of-life decisions for unbefriended patients and nursing home residents,[22][23] health care in prisons and jails,[24][25][26] the promotion of conflict mediation,[27][28] and standards for credentialing and privileging ethics consultants.