Medical Students' Affirmation of Ethics Education

Abstract

The medical students surveyed strongly affirmed ethics education in medical school and expressed clear preferences for curricular topics and teaching methods.

Ethics teaching in a medical education environment: preferences for diversity of learning and assessment methods

“…These results compare favorably with others examining medical students’ attitudes towards the subject of ethics and identifying the need for its teaching [7,9,16–19,21]. Also consistent with earlier reports [19,22], students recorded encountering ethical conflicts moderately frequently during training, and believed they had received a reasonable level of ethics training during medical school.…”

“…Consistent with the findings of prior surveys this cohort valued diverse learning approaches for ethics [9,16]; they expressed a strong preference for interactive methods of learning, such as discussion groups of peers led by a knowledgeable clinician, and interactions with patients during routine training with strong endorsement of the value of positive role models as the preferred learning method. There has been a call in the region for adoption of more interactive and engaging methods for ethics teaching instead of the current tendency which has a focus as lecturing [24].…”

“…The survey instrument provides subscales on professionalism and ethics education encompassing 10 domains based on the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) definition of professionalism. The domains include attitudes (25 items), goals [11], learning methods [19], knowledge assessment [6], skills assessment methods [8], educational needs concerning informed consent, principles [9,10], vulnerable populations [20], and relationship and boundaries in clinical practice (31 items) [16]. An additional five questions regarding personal ethics experiences during training and three demographic questions were added.…”

“…This is despite the fact that over the last three decades several studies have shown that a majority of medical students (64–84%) believe that ethical practices are critically important in the provision of the highest standards of medical care [7,8]. Students have also expressed pronounced enthusiasm (up to 95%) to learn more about medical ethics [7–9]. By understanding how students learn medical ethics we can plan the most effective ways in which to help them learn.…”

“…Hence, medical students are tutored and supervised by physicians from diverse cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Although, a few studies have been conducted elsewhere exploring medical trainees’ attitudes towards the subject of ethics generally [7–9,14–18], to the best of our knowledge, there is no published report from the Middle East exploring students view on professionalism. Little is known about the ethical dilemmas that medical students believe they encounter while working in these environs, or indeed their attitudes and perspectives on goals, learning, and assessment methods for the subject of medical ethics.…”