Changes to the Medical School's biomedical ethics offerings will be instituted next year, Med School administrators confirmed this week. Instead of teaching biomedical ethics material through group discussions as part of clerkships in students' third and fourth years, the material will become primarily classroom-based.
The subject of biomedical ethics is currently covered during hospital clerkships in the format of small group discussions, which are led by professional clinicians with expertise in biomedical ethics, according to Tom Bledsoe, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics. Next year, however, these discussions will be scaled down, and ethics will be taught in a classroom-based format in a new course for first- and second-year med students called "Doctoring," Bledsoe said.
The new course was first implemented this year for first-year students, but it only included a brief overview of biomedical ethics material. Next year, "Doctoring" will be offered to second-year students for the first time and will include an extensive study of ethics and ethical problems doctors are likely to face.
Bledsoe praised impending changes to the curriculum.
"If you look across the board about when and how med schools teach ethics, we're an outlier - the current program is expensive and time-intensive, so the people at the top have decided that we're not going to do that anymore."
Philip Gruppuso, associate dean of medicine, was one of the administrators involved in outlining changes to the curriculum. Gruppuso explained that the biomedical ethics program is supported by an endowment from the class of 1951, which was originally intended to "support the educational topic of humanism in medicine" at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The curriculum shift was intended to ensure that this endowment is being used in the most effective way.
"I know that this change comes in the context of a perception that the biomed ethics program is being cut or discontinued, and that's not the case at all. It is a change, but it's an expansive one," Gruppuso said. "I consider all of this a very positive development in the context of medical education. It's about broadening opportunities for students."
Bledsoe emphasized that the group discussions currently taking place during students' third- and fourth-year clerkships are highly valuable and will not be eliminated altogether. "There's the sense that when students are in the clinical rotations, the ethical issues that they're facing are not abstract and the students will get the most value from talking about something when they're directly dealing with it," Bledsoe said.
Bharati Kalasapudi '07, a student in the Program for Liberal Medical Education, said she believes changes to the Med School's biomedical ethics offerings could improve its curriculum.
"I think it's great that students are being exposed to ethics early on in their Medical School education," she said. But "it's just important to make sure that that's something they're exposed to in their third and fourth years as well," she added.
The PLME program "does a good job" exposing students to the importance of the "physician-patient" relationship, Kalasapudi said, adding that talks for first-years effectively convey this material and "emphasize that medicine is not just lab work." Still, this component of the curriculum is "not as strong" in later years, she said, adding that cuts to undergraduate biomedical ethics offerings hurt the University's pre-medical curriculum.
Gruppuso said other changes to the teaching of biomedical ethics in the Med School will include the creation of summer research assistantships that will focus on humanities and the arts, which includes ethics-related material. Those positions will begin this summer.
