Time for a unified approach to medical ethics

Journal of Medical Ethics, 2009

Canadian family physician Médecin de famille canadien, 1981

Three main questions are central to teaching and learning medical ethics. Can ethics be taught? If it can, what are some of its teachable components? And what teaching methods are appropriate? The author supports the concept of ethical competence as the basis of an ethical practice. Ethical competence is a set of insights, skills, understandings, ways of thinking which can be taught. The parallel is drawn between these kinds of competencies and the components of rigorous thinking characteristic of the training and experience of medical problem-solvers. Finally the author takes up four common criticisms of this approach.

Hec Forum, 1989

… and International Bioethics, 2011

In the last three decades, formal ethics education has become a common feature of medical curricula. However, ethics teaching in medical schools has faced difficulty justifying the allocation of substantial time in the busy medical curriculum. The authors' primary goal is to summarize the core approaches attempted in the health care ethics courses at our University and described in the textbook written by one of the authors. Our educational goals are: (1) to provide historical insights; (2) to provide a methodological guide for addressing ethical issues in clinical and multidisciplinary settings; and (3) to inspire students' introspection. In our view, both the internal and external directions of moral inquiry should be pursued. In history education, the knowledge of landmark events will be indispensable, but not sufficient. Learners need to be motivated in the internal direction by not letting them separate the past and the present/future. In our experience, the internal pursuit in learning the history of health care ethics can be carried out by the student being aware of the possibility of being on "the wrong side." In methodology education, principles and the four-quadrant method are useful, but should not be presented as simply a set of action guides or checklists. Careful application of these "tools" to a particular case requires not only their external manipulation, but also some approaches to intake subjective viewpoints of each individual in the case. The narrative approach might be useful for that purpose, but needs to be grounded on basic principles not to place excessive value on consensus.

Medical Education, 1993

Summary. Medical ethics play an essential role in the practice of medicine, in the care of individual patients, in the allocation of health care resources, and in the formulation of health care policy. A specific body of knowledge, ‘biomedical ethics’, has developed which applies ethical theory to biomedical practice. This has provided doctors with tools systematically to integrate rational ethical analysis into clinical decision-making.Training in the discipline of biomedical ethics is now required for all doctors in Canada. The goals, content areas, learning objectives, and learning methods considered appropriate for advanced training in this field for medical specialists are provided in this paper. Six topic areas are discussed: introduction to ethical theory, clinical ethics, professional ethics, ethics of human experimentation, ethics of health policy, and independent study. Ways this curriculum could be organized and evaluated are also offered.

Journal of Medical Ethics, 2006

Objectives: To characterise UK undergraduate medical ethics curricula and to identify opportunities and threats to teaching and learning. Design: Postal questionnaire survey of UK medical schools enquiring about teaching and assessment, including future perspectives. Participants: The lead for teaching and learning at each medical school was invited to complete a questionnaire. Results: Completed responses were received from 22/28 schools (79%). Seventeen respondents deemed their aims for ethics teaching to be successful. Twenty felt ethics should be learnt throughout the course and 13 said ethics teaching and learning should be fully integrated horizontally. Twenty felt variety in assessment was important and three tools was the preferred number. A shortfall in ethics core competencies did not preclude graduation in 15 schools. The most successful aspects of courses were perceived to be their integrated nature and the small group teaching; weaknesses were described as a need for still greater integration and the heavily theoretical aspects of ethics. The major concerns about how ethics would be taught in the future related to staffing and staff development.

2010

Knowledge of the ethical and legal basis of medicine is as essential to clinical practice as an understanding of basic medical sciences. In the UK, the General Medical Council (GMC) requires that medical graduates behave according to ethical and legal principles and must know about and comply with the GMC's ethical guidance and standards. We suggest that these standards can only be achieved when the teaching and learning of medical ethics, law and professionalism are fundamental to, and thoroughly integrated both vertically and horizontally throughout, the curricula of all medical schools as a shared obligation of all teachers. The GMC also requires that each medical school provides adequate teaching time and resources to achieve the above. We reiterate that the adequate provision and coordination of teaching and learning of ethics and law requires at least one full-time senior academic in ethics and law with relevant professional and academic expertise. In this paper we set out an updated indicative core content of learning for medical ethics and law in UK medical schools and describe its origins and the consultative process by which it was achieved.

A combination of moral principles and values that are applied to take judgements in medical education, practice, and research are termed as medical ethics. There have been other many traditional medical ethics guidelines brought about by Muslim Ishaq ibn Ali al-ruhawi wrote “the Conduct of physicians”, Jewish and Catholic scholastic thinkers over time. Ethics in modern medicine started way back in 18 century when Thomas Percival, a physician based in England, wrote a book on medical ethics and coined the terminology of medical ethics and medical jurisprudence. The medical profession should be viewed differently and a rethought on the ethical practices is the need of hour to make it an exciting and fulilling profession. A rethink on the status of modern medicine will certainly pave the way for obtaining speciic answers for many dilemmas in modern medicine including the best ethical codes and practices

Journal of Medical Ethics, 1994

Teaching medical ethics to medical students in a pluralistic society is a challenging task. Teachers of ethics have obligations notjust to teach the subject matter but to help create an academic environment in which well motivated students have reinforcement of their inherent good qualities. Emphasis should be placed on the ethical aspects of daily medical practice and not just on the dramatic dilemmas raised by modem technology. Interdisciplinary teaching should be encouraged and teaching should span the entire duration of medical studies. Attention should be paid particularly to ethical problems faced by the students themselves, preferably at the time when the problems are most on the students' minds. A high level of academic demands, including critical examination of students 'progress is recommended. Finally, personal humility on the part of teachers can help set a good example for students to follow.