Iranian Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine

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Medical ethics is an interdisciplinary knowledge which increasingly developed during the last 30 years, and nowadays it becomes a part of medical student’s curriculum. Although, the quality of medical education has improved in Iran, but medical ethics teaching has not accomplished effective alteration yet. For deeper and more actual recognition of the challenges of medical ethics curriculum, we interviewed medical ethics instructors in a qualitative study. The data was collected by semi-structured interview with fourteen medical ethics instructors of Tehran University of Medical Sciences in 1389 and analyzed by Mairing content analyzing approach. Results of this study shows weaknesses and challenges in medical ethics curriculum which presented under five themes: comprehensiveness of goals, composing organization, proportion of content, active teaching method, and comprehensive system of evaluation. According to this the existing weaknesses and challenges of medical ethics curriculum can be considered as important obstacles in moral development of students. Considering those challenges, can develop medical ethics curriculum and introduce new models for medical ethics teaching.

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In recent years, the general consensus is that medical education should comprise ethics courses focusing on clinical decision-making skills and professional ethics in order to institutionalize a set of values in physicians. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the internal and external qualities of the medical ethics curriculum from the perspective of students.This was a survey research on a study population of 157 medical students who were taking the medical ethics course. A sample of 113 students were selected by simple random sampling, and data collection tool consisted of two researcher-made questionnaires. In this research, the internal quality of the curriculum was evaluated according to the following 9 elements as proposed by Francis Klein: objectives, content, learning activities, learning strategies, instructional material, resources, grouping, time, location, and evaluation. The external quality of the curriculum was assessed based on Kirkpatrick’s model with attention to students' views on achievement of course objectives in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes. Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (one-sample t-test). Based on the findings, the students viewed the internal quality of the medical ethics curriculum as undesirable in terms of the above-mentioned nine elements. Students also believed that the external quality of the ethics curriculum was at an average level in the knowledge and attitudes components, and undesirable in the skills component. Overall, our findings indicate that from the perspective of students, the quality of the medical ethics curriculum is low and the course needs to be reviewed and redesigned.

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