Mediating ethics and law in the curriculum
Practice points for mediating ethics and law in the curriculum Help your students and the educators in the medical school make sense of the course design in ethics and law.
• • •
Present your course in meaningful alignment with the wider curriculum in the medical school.
Devise a coherent humanistic scheme for your course in terms of body, person, and community of practice.
The design of your course is comprised of its content, teaching strategies, learning activities, assessment methods, and evaluation processes (Prideaux, 2003). For the coherence of this design, rather than what Miles et al. (1989) describe wryly as, “exposing students to a smorgasbord of ethically appropriate topics”, there are different schemes allied to the intrinsically human context of ethics and law that you may deploy. Depending on the best fit with the medical curriculum as a whole, the three broad categories of a humanistic course scheme for ethics and law may be indexed to body, person, and community of practice (Box 16). These are all predicated on aspects of boundary relating to patient care. The schemes are not mutually exclusive, and indeed belong together.
BOX 16 Schemes for course design in ethics and law predicated on boundary
A. Body B. Person C. Community of practice
Organ systems Life cycle
Humanities Human rights
Professional studies Clinical learning
The frame of professional ethics highlighted in the previous chapter (Box 11) can be brought to all of these schemes. As it has particular relevance to the ‘community of practice’ scheme, less attention will be given here to the schemes of ‘body’ and ‘person’ in order to develop this further.
Body
It may be that the core curriculum of your medical school is based on organ systems, providing an architecture with rich opportunities for contributing ethics and law to the block teaching, given its relevance throughout the structural hierarchy of systems from cell science to the societal level. Another scheme premised on human embodiment follows stages of the life cycle. From reproductive medicine, to decision-making in the healthcare of children and young people, to medical treatment of adults, to the needs of patients towards the end of life, to the duties owed to patients after death, the ethico- legal domain occupies an important place in each phase.
Integrating ethics and law horizontally across systems, life stages, or other dimensions of the wider curriculum as delivered by teachers within these specialties can render it somewhat diffuse. One way of correcting this is
...the three broad
categories of a humanistic course scheme for ethics and law may be indexed to body, person, and community of practice.
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Guide 53: Ethics and Law in the Medical Curriculum
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