Undergraduate Curriculum

Session Topics (in sequence)

1. Approaches to Ethical Evaluation
2. Shared decision-making and vulnerable populations, part 1: Minors and their parent
3. Interprofessional Ethics Session: Rapport Building and Conflict Management
4. Shared decision-making and vulnerable populations, part 2: Adults lacking capacity
5. Ethics and Communicable Diseases
6. The Doctor-patient Relationship
7. Key ethical issues in pregnancy
8. Ethics in Genetics
9. Best Interests at the End of Life
10. Clinical Research Ethics
11. Standard of Care and Medical Negligence
12. Professionalism and Ethics During Clinical Years

Students are provided resources for guided self-directed learning and assigned to groups for presentation. Groups post their slides online prior to the tutorial, and other students are requested to post questions / comments before the tutorial. 

Phase III coincides with the start of the clinical years for the medical students. For the current academic year, the sessions are mostly in-person except for CTS 1 – to include an online assignment, two Combined Teaching Session (CTS) and an Ethics Board Round to meet the objectives of this Phase.

The online assignment is aimed at reminding students about how to be a professional member of the clinical team when on their postings and the role students play in maintaining the trust of patients with the medical profession, and NUS Medicine.

The Ethics Board Round (EBR) will present students with a case with no prompts. Students must work together as a team to ask the right questions in identifying the legal, ethical and professional issues in a given dilemma as part of ethical reasoning training. They will analyse the case, discuss the findings in the EBR and respond to questions.

For the current academic year, ethics and professionalism case-based teaching will be conducted in a de-centralized format during selected clinical postings as part of their organized teaching (either as seminars or as interactive online teaching).

In this Phase, small group tutorials are organized to allow students to identify ethical issues surrounding a case they have seen, assess them holistically and relate them to a topic they have encountered earlier in the course (see list below). The presenting team prepares a brief summary of the relevant clinical, psychosocial, and existential issues, provide an analysis of the issues and relevant factors arising in the case, and the most clinically, psychosocial and ethically appropriate course of action. Groups are allocated either the ABC, Four Principles or the Four Box approach to use in their analysis. Each group presents one case whilst the others are tasked to play the role of ethics committee members and compare their recommendation with the final outcome of the presenting group.

The list of topics (students select one to cover in their presentation) includes:
1. Confidentiality
2. Consent / Capacity
3. Truth telling / nondisclosure / collusion
4. Justice (resource allocation, public health)
5. Best interests
6. Professionalism + Standards of care + Cultural sensitivity
7. Research ethics
8. End-of-life issues