Undergraduate Curriculum

The undergraduate five-year longitudinal Health Ethics, Law and Professionalism (‘HELP’) curriculum is designed to facilitate reflective practice and integrated learning, and to support medical students’ professional identity formation. Core elements of the HELP curriculum include knowledge of ethical, professional and legal foundations of clinicians’ duties to patients, families, interprofessional colleagues, and other stakeholders. For coming semester that begins in August, all HELP sessions are conducted online.

 

Undergraduate Curriculum

Phase I

Session Topics (in sequence)

  1. Professional identity formation
  2. Intro to healthcare ethics
  3. Autonomy and consent
  4. Privacy and confidentiality
  5. Acting in the patient’s best interest
  6. Person-centred care 
  7. Justice & healthcare allocation 
  8. Integrating ethics & professionalism (student presentations)

Format includes pre-class self-directed learning through readings and/or watching a lecture video and attempting a case-based question; tutors discuss the questions together with another case in an online small group tutorial, and summarize key learning points

Phase II

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

    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.

    Phase IV

    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).

    Phase V

    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

    Contact person

    Assoc Prof Michael Dunn for Curriculum Matters

    Ms Karen Teo