Medical ethics education: to what ends?

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Bioethics
• Professionalism in Medicine

Background:

• Medical ethics education encompasses legal duties, objective competencies, moral skills, and behavioral aims.
• Implementation of these goals faces inherent difficulties.
• The relationship between medical ethics education and quality patient care is conceptually problematic and empirically scarce.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe the multifaceted goals of medical ethics education.
• To assess the perceived importance and achievability of these goals by instructors.
• To explore the connection between medical ethics education and the concept of 'care'.

Main Methods:

• Review of medical ethics education goals.
• Survey of 126 medical ethics instructors on goal importance and achievement.
• Analysis of empirical data and conceptual interpretations of care.

Main Results:

• All educational goals are highly rated in importance.
• Goals related to legal duties and objective competencies are perceived as relatively achievable.
• Goals focused on character transformation are the most difficult to achieve.
• The link between medical ethics education and improved patient care is not clearly established.

Conclusions:

• Medical ethics education may be viewed as an enhancement rather than a necessity for effective medical practice.
• Character transformation goals in medical ethics are particularly challenging.
• The conceptual and empirical links between medical ethics, moral competence, and quality patient care require further investigation.