Abstract
Clinical ethics can be viewed as a practical discipline that provides a structured approach to assist healthcare practitioners in identifying, analysing and resolving ethical issues that arise in practice. Clinical ethics can therefore promote ethically sound clinical and organisational practices and decision-making, thereby contributing to health organisation and system quality improvement. In order to develop students’ decision-making skills, as well as prepare them for practice, we decided to introduce a clinical ethics strand within an undergraduate medical curriculum. We designed a programme of clinical ethics activities for teaching and assessment purposes that involved using ethical frameworks to analyse hypothetical and real-life cases in uni- and inter- professional groups. In this paper, we draw on medical student feedback collected over 6 years to illustrate the appeal to students of learning clinical ethics. We also outline the range of benefits for students, healthcare organisations, and the field of clinical ethics arising from tomorrow’s doctors experiencing clinical ethics early in their training. We conclude by briefly reflecting on how including clinical ethics within tomorrow’s doctors curricular can secure and continue future engagement in clinical ethics support services in the UK, alongside the dangers of preparing students for organisational cultures that might not (yet) exist. We anticipate the findings presented in the paper will contribute to wider debates examining the impact of ethics teaching, and its ability to inform future doctors’ practice.
Highlights
Clinical ethics can be viewed as a practical discipline that provides a structured approach to assist healthcare practitioners in identifying, analysing and resolving ethical issues that arise in practice [35]
We have examined student feedback from engaging in a range of clinical ethics activities during the third and fifth years of an undergraduate medical degree
Throughout the feedback, the benefits to receiving training in clinical ethics were apparent to medical students to support their learning during clinical placements, whereby the ethical frameworks acted as scaffolding and provided a ‘tool kit’ to be drawn upon as others have proposed [32, 41]
Summary
Clinical ethics can be viewed as a practical discipline that provides a structured approach to assist healthcare practitioners in identifying, analysing and resolving ethical issues that arise in practice [35]. In order to develop students’ decision-making skills, as well as prepare them for practice, we decided to introduce a clinical ethics strand within an undergraduate medical curriculum. We outline the range of benefits for students, healthcare organisations, and the field of clinical ethics arising from tomorrow’s doctors experiencing clinical ethics early in their training. Students reported their decision-making skills developed through the clinical ethics activities, and students perceived their ethical sensitivity and ethical awareness evolved when on clinical placement. We conclude by briefly reflecting on how including clinical ethics within tomorrow’s doctors curricular can secure and continue future engagement in clinical ethics support services in the UK, alongside the dangers of preparing students for organisational cultures that might not (yet) exist. We anticipate the findings presented in the paper will contribute to wider debates examining the impact of ethics teaching, and its ability to inform future doctors’ practice
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