BIOETHICS TEACHING AND ITS’ EFFECTIVENESS IN UNDERGRADUATE MEDICAL PROGRAMMES: A NARRATIVE REVIEW

Abstract

Medicine is an art as much as it is a science. Patients wish to consult professional and compassionate doctors, though they rarely meet such. To cultivate professionalism in medical students, bioethics teaching have been incorporated into medical programmes in varying degrees across the world. This reports findings from a narrative synthesis of previously published literature that evaluates the evidence regarding implementation of bioethics in undergraduate medical curricula, with special attention to the Asia, Pacific region. For this purpose, Google Scholar and MEDLINE/PubMed databases were searched for articles on bioethics published between January 2000 to April 2024. Reviews or studies that were published in languages other than English were excluded from the search. The focus was placed on the development of moral competence as the intention of this review was to inform bioethics teaching. The results reveal a high degree of diversity of the curricular structure of bioethics courses and the lack of formalization of bioethics in the curricula specially in the Asia-Pacific region. Bioethics teaching resulted on lowering student indecision when faced with moral dilemmas. The call for use of local cases to enhance bioethics education is prominent, enabling more opportunities for reflection and discussion, to stimulate critical judgment of future clinicians.