Article Text
Abstract
Medical ethics forms an essential component of an undergraduate medical programme. In the UK the Institute of Medical Ethics has released a consensus statement detailing its recommendations for a minimum curriculum for ethics. One important issue it highlights for inclusion is ‘Beginning of Life’, which includes a wide range of themes. This paper presents an evaluation of the current teaching and assessment of these important issues in UK medical schools, complemented by a specific analysis of students’ reaction to the teaching they received at the University of Edinburgh as part of their Obstetrics and Gynaecology rotation. Schools which responded to the survey reported a wide range of teaching and assessment methods. While there was a good overall coverage of topics, only one of them was covered by every institution and the religious/cultural elements of those topics were often neglected. The medical schools viewed better clinical integration of ethics teaching as the best route to improvement, but the students reported a desire for more ethics teaching in the form of specific tutorials, lectures or discussions. It is likely that a combination of these approaches will lead to significant improvements in the delivery of ethics teaching in this area and in others.
- Abortion
- Education
- Ethics
- Obstetrics and Gynaecology
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Request Permissions
If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.
Copyright information:
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Teaching, learning and assessment of medical ethics at the UK medical schools
- Medical ethics and law for doctors of tomorrow: the 1998 Consensus Statement updated
- Reflections on learning and teaching medical ethics in UK medical schools
- How medical students learn ethics: an online log of their learning experiences
- Medical students’ perceptions of their ethics teaching
- FY1 doctors’ ethicolegal challenges in their first year of clinical practice: an interview study
- Abortion education in UK medical schools: a survey of medical educators
- Teaching and assessing medical ethics: where are we now?
- Harnessing the LMG legacy: the IME's vision for the future
- Fifty years of medical ethics: from the London Medical Group to the Institute of Medical Ethics