Before dealing with questions surrounding the core topics to be covered and how to deliver these in the programme, it is essential first to establish a vision appropriate to your context of what is the primary purpose of student learning in medical law and ethics.
BOX 2 Managing your initial approach to curriculum tasks
important Prioritise:
Imminent teaching / assessment Medical school timelines Curriculum mapping
Central committee membership Schedule:
Later teaching / assessment Review of content and delivery Curriculum development Curriculum evaluation
not important Minimise:
Immediacies that are peripheral both to operational and quality matters in your curriculum responsibilities and other work
File:
Ephemera of little relevance both to operational and quality matters in your curriculum responsibilities and other work
Before dealing with questions surrounding the core topics to be covered and how to deliver these in the programme, it is essential first to establish a vision appropriate to your context of what is the primary purpose of student learning in medical law and ethics.
Miles et al. (1989) comment on the need for ethics education in medicine to be “conceptually coherent” and “academically rigorous”. Once you bring this clarity to your aims, a suitable form of course design can then be conceived to follow its required function. This will entail matching your statements of educational intent with relevant learning experiences and appropriate assessment tools. A competency-based curriculum, for example, will be designed to catalyse students’ development across the range of excellences defined by the medical school (Harden et al., 1999a, 1999b; Prideaux, 2000, 2003; Rees, 2004).
Different medical schools in different territorial contexts will have their own requirements from a curriculum in ethics and law. For example, Kennedy & Grubb (2000) comment that, “uniformity throughout the diverse cultures of Europe is a virtual impossibility on many of the questions that medical law must address”. While this AMEE Guide seeks as far as possible to temper the assumptions inherent to its own sociocultural context, there is selectivity in the language and literature of these pages, which is exclusively Anglophone and from the West. It is hoped that readers internationally may further enrich this through participation in the AMEE Guide Supplements (Gibbs, 2008).
Given the variation in content at the level of course topics, where might consensus be found at the level of aims for ethico-legal education across medical schools and countries? Goldie (2000) points to aims of student learning in awareness and analysis:
“(To) produce doctors who should be able to competently analyse clinical situations, identifying any inherent moral issue(s) using knowledge of the range of moral concepts used frequently in ethical theory, while being sensitive to variations in circumstances that change meaning in ethically sensitive ways. They would be aware of their own values and beliefs, and those of each individual decision maker in the process of
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Guide 53: Ethics and Law in the Medical Curriculum
non-urgent
urgent
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