Ethics Cases: Do they Elicit Different Levels of Ethical Reasoning?

Abstract

Ethics education is widely accepted as a fundamental component of health care professionals’ personal and professional development (Goldie 2000). Universities must be satisfied that students have reached a minimum standard of ethical competence as well as clinical competence before they enter their chosen professions (Wong and Cheung 2003). However, educators have questioned whether bioethics courses adequately prepare graduates to manage the ethical issues they experience in professional practice (Elkin 2004). Student evaluations indicate formal ethics courses are helpful for introducing theoretical concepts but provide limited strategies for responding to practice dilemmas (West and Chur-Hansen 2004). Perceived gaps between ethical philosophies taught in university classrooms and ‘real life’ professional experiences remain a key challenge for educators (Cowley 2005; Kirklin 2007). Such gaps may persist when teaching focusses upon sensational or oversimplified examples that bear little semblance to the ethical issues that typically occur in professional practice (Coope 1996). Outcomes of ethics education may be strongly influenced by what students observe and experience during professional socialization (Saat et al. 2012) and students may experience miss-matches between content of ethics classes and perceptions of academic and clinical staff members’ responses towards professional issues (Hafferty and Franks 1994). Furthermore, an emphasis upon reactive approaches to ethical dilemmas may not prepare students to adopt proactive ethical decision making in diverse professional practice contexts (Verges 2010). J Acad Ethics (2015) 13:259–275 DOI 10.1007/s10805-015-9234-6