Teaching bioethics to healthcare students is a difficult task principally because the academic curriculum is very rigorous and the belief in most students, staff and administration is that it is not important for enhancing their career. In our ongoing endeavors of innovative way of teaching Bioethics, we attempted at understanding the opinion of undergraduate students on effectiveness of debate as an effective mode of teaching bioethics in a class room session. Students who volunteered to take part in the debate were requested to speak for and against a bioethical issue which in this case was body image and cosmetic surgery. The other students were participants and observed the proceedings. In the end a structured questionnaire was provided to all students and their opinion was sought on the usefulness of debate as a teaching method in the area of bioethics. The results from this study indicated that debate was enjoyable (54.8), helps maintain attention in class (87.68) and effective in conveying ethical issues (64.39). The other important aspect was that 53.43% students felt that debate was better than the conventional class room teaching for bioethics. As far as the authors are aware of this is the first study that addresses the usefulness of skit as a teaching method and believe that it could be an effective addendum to conventional teaching method in bioethics and needs to be appropriately incorporated.
Knowledge, attitudes and practices of medical ethics among 297 undergraduate medical interns of four medical colleges from eastern part of India were assessed using a self administered structured questionnaire. Questions on source of medical ethics, codes and guidelines were set to assess the knowledge of medical ethics while importance of ethics, autonomy, justice and confidentiality were used as questions to assess attitudes towards medical ethics. Practices of medical ethics, however, were assessed by questions on frequency of ethical dilemma, research ethics etc. Out of 297, 259 interns (87.2%) responded. 106 interns (40.9%) said that sources of knowing medical ethics are lectures and/or seminars. Others told either through own reading (20.6%), training (19.8%) or during doing work (18.7%). In code & guidelines, all interns knew Hippocratic Oath but 52.3% interns were aware of Indian Council of Medical Research's code of ethics. 87.6% interns admitted importance of ethics in their work but 22.5% interns believed that consent is required only during operation and not at the time of taking blood. In practice of ethics 52.5% interns told that ethical dilemma comes once in a month. 12.4% interns, however, told that they faced ethical dilemma in their daily work. Regarding application of consent form in human research, 58.1% interns knew about informed consent. 100% interns had no clear cut idea about ethical issue on end-of-life. Implementation of teaching on medical ethics seems to be important in undergraduate medical curriculum in this study zone.
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