Teaching Medical Ethics: Future Challenges

While the mechanics and the immediate goals of setting up programs for teaching medical ethics to medical students are reasonably well established, there are a number of important conceptual issues that have so far received insufficient attention in the literature. These include writing behavioral objectives and formal evaluations for an ethics program; deciding on the proper placement of ethics in the student's academic career; defining a health care team ethic to replace a strictly individual ethic; maintaining a critical tension between the individual and the bioethical dimensions; and preparing for ethical issues of the future. These issues are raised here not to provide answers, but rather to stimulate increased discussion and intellectual interchange in the medical-educational community.