Perception on medical ethics in teaching among medical students in India

The importance of teaching medical ethics has emerged as a priority in recent decades. It is of interest to document data on the perceptions of the medical students on teaching professionalism and medical ethics during the foundation course using a validated questionnaire. The Cross sectional study was conducted a Medical college in South India consisted of 150 first year MBBS Students. We received 133 responses ,40% of the students agreed that medical ethics is just a common sense, Many students (80%) agreed that the topics taught during these medical ethics sessions were relevant , easy to comprehend, teaching learning methods adopted were appropriate and they were able to participate and engage in the teaching learning activity. Majority felt that the sessions created awareness about the ethical dilemmas that might arise during patient encounters and these sessions will help them to give a justified response and agreed that these sessions made them understand the foundations of philosophical, social and legal aspects of medical ethics and also motivated them to learn more about this medical ethics .Education in medical ethics is important to practise professionally and will improve their personality skills. Suggestions given to improve ethics teaching were to increase case based discussions, reflections by the senior faculty, movie demonstrations. Students identified importance of ethics education in current day and also favoured interactive methods of teaching for the delivery of ethics related competency.