Background: Residents struggle with the evaluation and management of inpatient clinical ethical dilemmas. However, few residency programs include medical ethics education as part of their graduate medical training. This study aims to explore the perceived effectiveness, benefits, and learning experiences of residents with small group discussions about ethical dilemmas. Method: We instituted weekly residency ethical conferences to clarify residents’ understanding of medical ethics and to improve their medical ethics competence. Six to nine residents and two or more professors attended the ethical conferences and participated in the discussions. Each participant was given at least five minutes to share their thoughts and reasoning concerning a designated ethical dilemma. In the course of these meetings we also surveyed participants’ self-confidence, level of satisfaction, communication skills, moral motivation, attitudes, reasoning, and moral sensitivity. Result: Teaching residents by means of small group discussions on ethical dilemmas can enhance their ability to address these issues directly and to resolve clinical ethical dilemmas appropriately. Additionally, these group discussions were found to improve participants’ level of satisfaction and ability to communicate. Conclusion: Our experience with small group discussions based on cases involving moral dilemmas shows that discussion can be an effective and practical method of ethics education for residents. The results of this study may have implications for the future improvement of graduate medical education.

Doctors routinely deal with death, but their experience and impressions toward death are not well known. Examination into how doctors perceive death has been limited mainly due to complications in research methods. The purpose of this study is to assess doctors’ experience regarding death qualitatively by examining their first death pronouncement and to deduce their perceptions and awareness toward death related issues. Eleven first-year and second-year residents from a university hospital in Korea participated in in-depth interviews. Their comments were recorded, documented, and analyzed using grounded theory. Three major categories were identified: participants’ impressions when pronouncing death, participants’ views of their role in pronouncing death, and participants’ views on the need for education/training in pronouncing death. The first category was further divided into personal and professional impressions. The second category illustrated a doctor’s role in pronouncing death (i.e., defining death and a doctor’s role during bereavement). All participants expressed the need to be taught how to pronounce death and asked for further training in communicating with family members of the deceased. Participants shared negative feelings regarding their experiences in pronouncing death due to a lack of education in dealing with the death of a patient. It is essential for novice doctors to clearly understand their roles in pronouncing the death of a patient, a goal that may be achieved through education programs.