Thirty years ago when I, an attorney, took a tenure-track faculty position at an innovative, newly opened medical school, I was an oddity — truly, a stranger in a strange land. Today it is not uncommon for American medical schools to employ an attorney as a tenured or tenure-track member of its faculty. Over these last three decades, the educational roles and responsibilities of health law faculty who teach in law schools have become increasingly well defined, with numerous health law (...) courses and textbooks now generally accepted as part of the typical law school curriculum. However, the roles and responsibilities of attorney faculty members who teach in medical schools remain less clearly defined and likely are more individualized to the particular medical schools in which they teach. This essay explores some of the challenges and the opportunities which are given to attorney faculty members who teach in medical schools. (shrink)

Thirty years ago when I, an attorney, took a tenure-track faculty position at an innovative, newly opened medical school, I was an oddity — truly, a stranger in a strange land. Today it is not uncommon for American medical schools to employ an attorney as a tenured or tenure-track member of its faculty. Over these last three decades, the educational roles and responsibilities of health law faculty who teach in law schools have become increasingly well defined, with numerous health law (...) courses and textbooks now generally accepted as part of the typical law school curriculum. However, the roles and responsibilities of attorney faculty members who teach in medical schools remain less clearly defined and likely are more individualized to the particular medical schools in which they teach. This essay explores some of the challenges and the opportunities which are given to attorney faculty members who teach in medical schools. (shrink)

While there is significant consensus that undergraduate medical education should include bioethics training, there is widespread debate about how to teach bioethics to medical students. Educators disagree about course methods and approaches, the topics that should be covered, and the effectiveness and metrics for UME ethics training. One issue that has received scant attention is the timing of bioethics education during medical training. The existing literature suggests that most medical ethics education occurs in the pre-clinical years. Follow-up studies indicate that (...) medical students in their clinical rotations have little recall or ability to apply ethics concepts that were learned in their pre-clinical training. Trainees also report a desire for medical ethics to be taught in the context of practical application, which would suggest that the timing of pre-clinical ethics education is flawed. However, moving bioethics training to the clinical years should not be assumed to be the solution to the problems of recall and theory application. We argue that the effectiveness of timing bioethics education will depend on when medical students witness or experience particular categories of ethical dilemmas during their training. Our overarching hypothesis is that ethics education will be most effective when the bioethics training on a particular topic correlates to experiential exposure to that ethical issue. The purpose of our current study was to describe medical students exposure to particular categories of ethical conflicts, dilemmas, or issues. Our results may help bioethics educators better strategize about the most effective timing of medical ethics training in UME. (shrink)

The clinical clerkships in medical school are the first formal opportunity for trainees to apply bioethics concepts to clinical encounters. These clerkships are also typically trainees’ first sustained exposure to the “reality” of working in clinical teams and the full force of the challenges and ethical tensions of clinical care. We have developed a specialized, embedded ethics curriculum for Vanderbilt University medical students during their second year to address the unique experience of trainees’ first exposure to clinical care. Our embedded (...) curriculum is centered around core “ethics competencies” specific to the clerkship: for Medicine, advanced planning and end-of-life discussions; for Surgery, informed consent; for Pediatrics, the patient-family-provider triad; for Obstetrics and Gynecology, women’s autonomy, unborn child’s interests, and partner’s rights; and for Neurology/Psychiatry, decision-making capacity. In this paper, we present the rationale for these competencies, how we integrated them into the clerkships, and how we assessed these competencies. We also review the additional ethical issues that have been identified by rotating students in each clerkship and discuss our strategies for continued evolution of our ethics curriculum. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)