New doctors not always discussing medical ethics
Educators who mentor young doctors are missing opportunities to teach them about medical ethics, according to a new study.
Physicians in training face all sorts of bioethics questions during their day – from what do about a patient who can’t afford medicine to a patient that refuses treatment. But doctors who oversee residents don’t always take time to talk about the issues, say bioethicists at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.
“Teaching about ethics and professionalism in real time is a very important part of the training experience,” said Dr. Joseph Carrese, the study’s lead author and a core faculty member at the Berman Institute, in a statement. “It appears from our findings that opportunities to identify those issues and teach about them were missed.”
The ethicists conducted a two-week observational study of 53 internal medicine residents and the 19 mentoring physicians overseeing them. Findings were described in the July issue of Medical Education. Mentors taught about ethical issue only12 percent of the time.
The main hurdle to discussing issue more often is time, Carrese said. But he said strategies can be developed to streamline difficult conversations. One idea is a checklist that can help doctors assess a patient’s decision-making ability during an emergency or situation.
It goes by the acronym, CURVES: Choose and Communicate, Understand, Reason, Value, Emergency and Surrogate.
“If we better understand what the barriers and needs are,” Carrese says, “then we as ethics faculty are going to be in a better position to help and enhance how they teach trainees about ethics in real time.”
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Tags: Ethics, Medical Ethics
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