Undergraduate medical ethics education currently focuses on ethical concepts and reasoning. This paper uses an intern’s story of an ethically challenging situation to argue that this emphasis is problematic in terms of ensuring students’ ethical practice as junior doctors. The story suggests that it is aligning their actions with the values that they reflectively embrace that can present difficulties for junior doctors working in the pressures of the hospital environment, rather than reasoning to an ethically appropriate action. I argue that (...) junior doctors need skills for implementing their ethical decisions and that these ought to form a central component of undergraduate medical ethics education. (shrink)

Objectives: To characterise UK undergraduate medical ethics curricula and to identify opportunities and threats to teaching and learning.Design: Postal questionnaire survey of UK medical schools enquiring about teaching and assessment, including future perspectives.Participants: The lead for teaching and learning at each medical school was invited to complete a questionnaire.Results: Completed responses were received from 22/28 schools . Seventeen respondents deemed their aims for ethics teaching to be successful. Twenty felt ethics should be learnt throughout the course and 13 said ethics (...) teaching and learning should be fully integrated horizontally. Twenty felt variety in assessment was important and three tools was the preferred number. A shortfall in ethics core competencies did not preclude graduation in 15 schools. The most successful aspects of courses were perceived to be their integrated nature and the small group teaching; weaknesses were described as a need for still greater integration and the heavily theoretical aspects of ethics. The major concerns about how ethics would be taught in the future related to staffing and staff development.Conclusions: This study describes how ethics was taught and assessed in 2004. The findings show that, although ethics now has an accepted place in the curriculum, more can be done to ensure that the recommended content is taught and assessed optimally. (shrink)

The teaching of ethics in UK medical schools has recently been reviewed, from the perspective of the teachers themselves. A questionnaire survey of medical undergraduates at King’s College London School of Medicine provides useful insight into the students’ perception of ethics education, what they consider to be the value of learning ethics and law, and how engaged they feel with the subject.