Case-Based Teaching of Ethics: Ethical Challenges Raised by Undergraduate Medical Students during a Bioethics Course (What Students Bring to the Classroom?)

Teaching ethics for undergraduate medical students provides an excellent opportunity to equip them with essential skills to deal with ethical dilemmas that they may face in their future career. Teaching bioethics is challenging for clinical teachers. The current study reports on one of the assignments in which the students present a real case with analysis of the relevant ethical issues. Each student registered in ethics course writes a report analyzing an ethical case. The report was carefully read and the most prominent three ethical issues in the incident were identified, any related additional comments or details were noted. The data collection forms were analyzed using SPSS version 22. About half of the incidents (49%) occurred in government hospitals. Of the total incidents, most of the incidents occurred in the outpatient care (42.9%), inpatient care (22.7%), and emergency room (20.6%). About one third of the cases were related to patient autonomy and choice (30.4%), followed by confidentiality and privacy issues (21.1%). Informed consent represented 8%, medical errors (6.1%), necessity issues (4.9%), abortion (4.5%) and professionalism (4%). Students were able to recognize the ethical issues in the cases, which indirectly reflected their ethical sensitivity. They were able to utilize the ethical principles they learned during the course and apply these principles. They were able to recognize, analyze, and criticize unethical and unprofessional behaviors of their own clinical teachers. Students experiences with ethical issues reflected in the cases are important and beneficial.