Teaching in the Health Sciences
School of Medicine
MED 755: Ethics in Medicine
The Center teaches the ethics curriculum primarily in the 1st three years at the Emory School of Medicine. The overall goal of this course is to introduce future physicians to the knowledge, skills, and moral attentiveness to enable them to consider carefully the ethical challenges that are a regular part of the practice of medicine. Ethics sessions are held in five departmental clerkships: Gynecology/Obstetrics, Medicine, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Surgery. Kathy Kinlaw directs this curriculum and John Banja, Jonathan Crane and Gerard Vong serve on the faculty as well. The course covers core competencies in clinical ethics and engages students’ own experiences in caring for patients and families. System ethics issues, training issues, and organizational ethics issues are also incorporated in many sessions.
Center for Ethics faculty co-teach each ethics session with clinical faculty fellows onsite where students are caring for patients.
PA 625: Biomedical Ethics
PA 625 is the medical ethics course presented to physician assistants. Its objectives are to enable students to identify the ways valuative issues, beliefs, and attitudes give rise to ethical dilemmas in health care. By the end of the course, students are expected to be able to demonstrate a keen familiarity with the grammar of medical ethics, especially as that grammar involves notions about autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice. They should be able to analyze ethical dilemmas in terms of the valuative and conceptual or “principled” tensions that precipitate and sustain them. Students should also be able to contemplate and develop remedies for ethical dilemmas in health care that are morally sensitive, legally acceptable, and professionally defensible. Students should be able to apply models of ethical decision making to case studies.
School of Nursing
NRSG503: Advanced Practice Nursing: Ethical, Legal, and Leadership Issues and NRSG708: Health Care Ethics
The Ethics Center has a longstanding collaborative relationship with the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, working with faculty to teach ethics courses and incorporating ethics within the content of the nursing curriculum. Nursing ethics courses that center faculty have taught or co-taught include Advanced Practice Nursing: Ethical, Legal, and Leadership Issues (NRSG503) and Health Care Ethics (NRSG708). In addition, center faculty have been frequent guest lecturers on a variety of ethics-related issues for a number of undergraduate and graduate-level nursing courses.
School of Public Health
EPI 593: Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in Responsible Clinical Research
Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in Responsible Clinical Research (EPI 593) prepares students enrolled in the master's in clinical research program at the Rollins School of Public Health to engage in theoretically and practically based discourse and decision making in ethical issues involved in clinical and biomedical research. Students learn to trace the evolution and content of 20th-century Western ethical sensibilities and regulatory guidance bearing on clinical research. They will be able to identify significant ethical features of the design of clinical trials, especially as they pertain to the collection, analysis, and management of data. They also will be able to discuss the ethical dimensions of research participant recruitment, informed consent, authorship, and plagiarism. Special topics include ethical issues related to community research, conflicts of interest, and the ethical dimensions of animal experimentation and dual use.