Constructing ethics and law in the curriculum
Practice points for constructing ethics and law in the curriculum Consider a design for your course based on professional ethics in medicine.
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Reinforce your design with a suitable frame for student learning around the key emphases.
Highlight everyday, theory-based, habits, intentions, consequences, and society elements of your course.
Clinical practice takes place within both ethical and legal frameworks, which is to say that our ethics is partly informed by law (Box 9). We can further develop the interplay of ethics, law, and the individual practitioner along the lines indicated in Box 10, which factors out three sources of ethics in sets of professional, legal, and personal responsibilities. These in turn relate to patients, to ourselves, to healthcare institutions, to regulatory bodies, and to society.
BOX 10
Dynamic sources of medical ethics Legal
Ethics in medicine
Professional
Clinical practice takes place within both ethical and legal frameworks, which is to say that our ethics is partly informed by law.
Personal
These dimensions are not static regions with areas of overlap. The legal and professional act upon each other, and in turn these two dimensions act directly upon the individual practitioner. In their formation as medical professionals, it is important that our students have the opportunity to clarify for themselves how they relate the personal dimension to the legal and professional frameworks of clinical practice, and this is considered further in the next chapter.
In our curriculum planning we need a rationale for our selection of course content, based on the intended learning we wish our students to achieve. Following the previous chapter, the rationale adopted here is that of professional ethics in medicine, in line with the recommendation of Hafferty & Franks (1994) that “medical ethics is best framed… as part of one’s professional identity”, and of Goldie (2004) that, “Ethics should be addressed as part of the wider domain of professionalism”.
There is strong support for such a rationale in the literature. Hilton & Slotnick (2005) identify ethical practice as the first of their six domains of professionalism. The framework of professional knowledge developed by Michael Eraut (1994), comprises dimensions of the propositional (theory), the
Guide 53: Ethics and Law in the Medical Curriculum
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