Teaching through clinical cases: a good method to study bioethics. Experience at the Lleida Faculty of Medicine

This paper summarises our experience in the teaching of bioethics during the final course in medicine at the Universitat de Lleida. Teaching has been based on the discussion of real clinical cases, the ethical implications of which have been extracted and presented by the professor, and analysed under his supervision. We present here the objectives, the programme and the course and evaluation methodology used, as well as the results of an inquiry carried out among the 55 students attending the course. The acceptance level was 92% and the attendance 95%. We believe the methodology used to be successful, since it makes possible the introduction of theoretical aspects of bioethics in order to solve actual cases, as well as encourage wide discussion. At the same time it emphasises that the students discover the values involved.