Changes in undergraduate attitudes toward medical ethics

To detect any change in medical students' attitudes toward medical ethics, students from the same class were given a questionnaire on their first day of medical school and again near the end of their fourth year of study. The results showed a strong shift away from the students' initial expectations that they would rely on specialists or scholarly sources in the future; the need for a medical ethics course in the curriculum, while still felt, was less important to them by the fourth year. The reasons for these changes were not apparent, for the students' levels of knowledge and perceptions of the role of ethics in medicine in the first and fourth years did not differ. It is recommended that medical school faculty actively reinforce the initially positive attitudes of students during clinical supervision.