COVID-19 era healthcare ethics education: Cultivating educational and moral resilience

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has had profound effects on global health, healthcare, and public health policy. It has also impacted education. Within undergraduate healthcare education of doctors, nurses, and allied professions, rapid shifts to distance learning and pedagogic content creation within new realities, demands of healthcare practice settings, shortened curricula, and/or earlier graduation have also challenged ethics teaching in terms of curriculum allotments or content specification. We propose expanding the notion of resilience to the field of ethics education under the conditions of remote learning. Educational resilience starts in the virtual classroom of ethics teaching, initially constituted as an “unpurposed space” of exchange about the pandemic’s challenging impact on students and educators. This continuously transforms into “purposed space” of reflection, discovering ethics as a repertory of orientative knowledge for addressing the pandemic’s challenges on personal, professional, societal, and global levels and for discovering (and then addressing) that the health of individuals and populations also has moral determinants. As such, an educational resilience framework with inherent adaptability rises to the challenge of supporting the moral agency of students acting both as professionals and as global citizens. Educational resilience is key in supporting and sustaining professional identify formation and facilitating the development of students’ moral resilience and leadership amid moral complexity and potential moral transgression—not only but especially in times of pandemic.

Ethical problems among nurses during pandemics: A study from Turkey

“…In addition, studies have reported that nurses were disappointed when they could not provide the necessary care for their patients, they felt ineffectual due to constant worries that they could not treat chronic patients, and though that they might endanger their health and that of their colleagues. Encountering too many deaths, patients dying in isolation and alone, fear of being infected themselves, the lack of protective equipment, infecting colleagues, families, friends due to lack of protective equipment or established protocols all threaten emotional and psychological well-being [31] . Nurses need information about Covid-19, healthcare ethics, nursing skills and psychological resilience strategies, ethical support, coping tools, and even therapy to prevent or alleviate the negative effects of these traumas on their psychosocial health, or to increase psychological resilience.…”

The blacksmith approach: a strategy for teaching and learning in the medical anatomy course (a qualitative study)

“…This statement is consistent with Wald and Monteverde (2021). They report that educational resilience is vital in supporting and sustaining healthcare professional identity development and facilitating the progress of students' moral resilience and complexity, especially in times of pandemic [25].…”

“…Resilience includes cognitive processes and has four dimensions, including self-efficacy. Planning, Self-control, Commitment, and perseverance include the following: young doctors must be present in various educational environments and support clinical and educational supervisors in enduring difficulties to help them develop personal and professional resilience [24,25].…”

The experience of diagnostic radiography students during the early stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic – a cross‐sectional study

“…The need to move to online education and the impact this has on the anxiety levels of students was explored in a number of studies and students predominantly expressed anxiety about the future unfamiliarity and uncertainty. 24,[30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] A review of how information was provided to students would be useful to establish the best platforms to share constant, and ongoing updates.…”