Medical Ethics Education and the Turkish Experience: Medical Education

Medical science is an activity of scientific application, which has ethical dimensions as per its nature and goal. Therefore, medical education should inevitably include medical ethics education. The objective of medical ethics education is to bring up physicians, who acknowledge their legal responsibilities and the system of values underlying the profession of medicine, exercise ethical values in their relationships with patients, and have the skills to resolve value conflicts that may emerge. The studies on the improvement and functionalization of medical ethics education has been gradually increasing in recent years. The World Medical Association and the World Federation of Medical Education support all faculties of medicine in providing necessary time and resource for ethics education, and they suggest guidelines. Medical ethics programs were initially discussed on a large platform such as the approach of "humanities" in the United States and Europe. Later, the focus expanded to the point of clinical ethics education, which included physician-patient relationship, clinical reasoning and decision -making. "Medical Ethics" courses in Turkey started in 1980s and rapidly became widespread in the programs of related academic fields. The Turkish Medical Association, the Guest House Society and the Turkish Bioethics Association contributed to the development of medical ethics education. Recently, medical ethics education is being redefined in terms of its aims, methods and content. This article examines the development of medical ethics education in the world and Turkey, introduces the basic characteristics of the programs in faculties that adopt different education strategies, and discusses the Current ethics education in Turkey along with its different dimensions.