European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine

Abstract

Background: To Assess the role of Medical Ethics and professionalism in Medical Education and to assess the impact of teaching Medical Ethics and professionalism to Undergraduate students in new curriculum.
Methods: The present cross-sectional study was conducted among the 100 practicing doctors of Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS), Adilabad. After taking the informed consent, the participants were given the semi structured self-administrative questionnaire which includes questions regarding the demographic details of the participants and questions regarding the ethics and professionalism in medical education. The data was entered in Microsoft Excel and was analyzed using SPSS version 21.
Results: Majority (60%) of participants completed their post-graduation. Mean duration of clinical practice is 17 years. Among the participants 50% were following ethical and professional behaviour sometimes, 28% of them were always following ethical and professional behaviour and 22% were not following ethical and professional behaviour. For the question regarding opinion about the ethical and professional behaviour of colleagues, 64% of the participants told that their colleagues always follows ethical and professional behaviour, 32% gave the opinion that their colleagues follow ethical behaviour some times and others told that their colleagues does not follow ethical and professional behaviour. Among the participants 62% were facing ethical issues once a week, 21% were facing once a month, 13% were facing once a year rest were not facing any ethical issues.
Conclusion: from our experience, it becomes clear that we have ignored the importance of ethics teaching in undergraduate medical curriculum. Participants in this study revealed that only 28 % were following ethical and professional behaviour in their practice and one of the major reasons found for unethical behaviour was workload. Seventy one percent of the participants told that, it is extremely important to teach about ethics and professionalism in the undergraduate curriculum. Majority (58%) of the participants told that, teaching ethics and professionalism in the new UG curriculum is going to cause high impact in the future.