Core topics of health care ethics. The identification of core topics for interprofessional education

Abstract

Objectives: The aim of this project was to identify core topics of health care ethics that could be taught through an inter-professional approach to undergraduate education.

Design: Five nominal group technique workshops.

Setting and participants: Teaching staff from different professional disciplines in our university (nursing branches, occupational therapy and physiotherapy).

Results: Seven core topics of health care ethics that are common across all disciplines were identified. However participants in all workshops identified the need for case studies used in teaching and learning to be specific to the clinical setting encountered by the student.

Conclusion: Despite the identification of core topics that apply to all disciplines, caution should be taken when seeking to integrate these into an inter-professional undergraduate programme. There is evidence from other studies that students have difficulty in transferring knowledge from one context to another. In view of this, an inter-professional approach to health care ethics teaching to a group, members of which do not encounter shared clinical ethical problems may be inappropriate. It is suggested that inter-professional learning in undergraduate health care ethics should focus on facilitating learning in the clinical area with students who share similar ethical encounters, in which case the learning will be truly inter-professional.