How Should Ethics be Taught to Medical, Nursing and Other Healthcare Students?

In the last three decades, formal ethics education has become a common feature of medical curricula. However, ethics teaching in medical schools has faced difficulty justifying the allocation of substantial time in the busy medical curriculum. The authors‘ primary goal is to summarize the core approaches attempted in the health care ethics courses at our University and described in the textbook written by one of the authors. Our educational goals are: (1) to provide historical insights; (2) to provide a methodological guide for addressing ethical issues in clinical and multidisciplinary settings; and (3) to inspire students‘ introspection. In our view, both the internal and external directions of moral inquiry should be pursued. In history education, the knowledge of landmark events will be indispensable, but not sufficient. Learners need to be motivated in the internal direction by not letting them separate the past and the present/future. In our experience, the internal pursuit in learning the history of health care ethics can be carried out by the student being aware of the possibility of being on "the wrong side." In methodology education, principles and the four-quadrant method are useful, but should not be presented as simply a set of action guides or checklists. Careful application of these "tools" to a particular case requires not only their external manipulation, but also some approaches to intake subjective viewpoints of each individual in the case. The narrative approach might be useful for that purpose, but needs to be grounded on basic principles not to place excessive value on consensus.