Gaps in medical school in the approach to ethics, bioethics, and palliative care: a challenge for professional training

Abstract

Medical education requires discipline, effort, and dedication for professional improvement, which complies with the requirement for vast, dynamic knowledge, including (bio)technologies in diagnostics and therapeutics. However, this process does not ensure the appropriate human training of health professionals to deal with an abrupt demographic transition of older people with several comorbidities as well as with an increase in life expectancy and in the risk of serious health-related suffering. There is a gap in bioethics education offered to undergraduate medical students, especially in bioethical principles (not only those related to biomedical and deontological ethics), which must be bridged before good communication, attitudes, behaviors, and, particularly, better decision-making can be demanded from medical actions. The advent of chronic and incurable diseases in recent decades has contributed to strengthening the hospice movement toward patient-centered care, highlighting an unmet demand for palliative care in the face of progressive, advanced, and critical conditions. Thus, personalism, a contemporary bioethical trend, in line with the principles of palliative care, calls for human training in bioethics by demonstrating the challenges of disease-focused care amidst the conflicts generated by biotechnoscience to provide comprehensive integrated patient-centered care.