Abstract
Ethical issues arise throughout healthcare, and as such ethics teaching has long-standing been an important component of education for healthcare professionals. While much of the way healthcare professionals have “learned” ethics has been informal, increasingly ethics has been formally integrated into the training programs for such healthcare professionals during their training and beyond. Ethics differs significantly from other components of training, for example, being considered more subjective and encompassing complex moral, philosophical, and personal concepts. While lending itself to interesting and stimulating discussion, ethics can pose challenges for those delivering such education. How such a subject should be taught, when, in what format, and by whom are all important considerations. The purpose and modes of assessment of such a topic are controversial and debated, not least because of a lack of consensus about what the aims of ethics education should be.
This chapter aims to address some of these questions by considering educational theory with a broader discussion of how medical ethics education is and how it ought to be. We consider the theory of ethics education, the practicalities that should be considered in designing and delivering ethics education programs, and finally the challenges faced by ethics educators. We articulate the key issues arising in the phenomenon of ethics education, considering teacher, learner, and higher education institution in a real-world context.
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Knight, S., Papanikitas, A. (2021). Teaching and Learning Ethics in Healthcare. In: Nestel, D., Reedy, G., McKenna, L., Gough, S. (eds) Clinical Education for the Health Professions. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6106-7_43-1
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