Gavel and stethoscope.

How to Assess the Impact of Medical Ethics Education

By Leah Pierson

There has been too little evaluation of ethics courses in medical education in part because there is not consensus on what these courses should be trying to achieve. Recently, I argued that medical school ethics courses should help trainees to make more ethical decisions. I also reviewed evidence suggesting that we do not know whether these courses improve decision making in clinical practice. Here, I consider ways to assess the impact of ethics education on real-world decision making and the implications these assessments might have for ethics education.

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Medical student textbooks with pencil and multicolor bookmarks and stethoscope isolated on white.

We Need to Evaluate Ethics Curricula

By Leah Pierson

Health professions students are often required to complete training in ethics. But these curricula vary immensely in terms of their stated objectives, time devoted to them, when during training students complete them, who teaches them, content covered, how students are assessed, and instruction model used. Evaluating these curricula on a common set of standards could help make them more effective.

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