Ethics education in US and Canadian family medicine residency programs: a review of the literature

Abstract

The importance of bioethics education as a valuable tool to be responsive to medicine’s complexities is affirmed by graduate medical education accreditation bodies and professional organizations alike. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), the body that accredits the majority of medical residency and fellowship programs in the United States, affirms the importance of ethics training for physicians in training. How this is accomplished is largely left to the prerogative of individual programs to manage, as benchmarks or milestones to ascertain this are not firmly in place. However, there is doubt that significant education in bioethics is being accomplished by individual residency programs. This review searched the PubMed database for relevant articles on the scope and objectives of ethics education in US and Canadian family medicine residency programs.