Tag: medical school

Gavel and stethoscope.

How to Assess the Impact of Medical Ethics Education

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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

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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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Pink piggy bank and stethoscope on a gray background.

Medical Schools Need to Do More to Reduce Students’ Debt

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By Leah Pierson

Today, the average medical student graduates with more than $215,000 of debt from medical school alone.

The root cause of this problem — rising medical school tuitions — can and must be addressed.

In real dollars, a medical degree costs 750 percent more today than it did seventy years ago, and more than twice as much as it did in 1992. These rising costs are closely linked to rising debt, which has more than quadrupled since 1978 after accounting for inflation.

Debt burdens

Physicians with more debt are more likely to experience to burnout, substance use disorders, and worse mental health. And, as the cost of medical education has risen, the share of medical students hailing from low-income backgrounds has fallen precipitously, compounding inequities in medical education.

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