의과대학에서의 윤리교육: 왜, 그리고 무엇을 어떻게

The concept of incorporating ethics courses into the medical curriculum has been firmly established in the most medical schools of Western world. Virtually every medical school curriculum in the United States, for example, includes medical ethics, and graduates have generally found these courses to be useful and have favored expansion of the programs.

In contrary, however, medical ethics has only recently been included in medical education in Korea. It was early 1980s when one medical school in Seoul first started teaching ethics to the senior medical students, and only half of all 41 medical schools in Korea now are providing some form of ethics education to the medical students.

Physicians and curriculum committees have been hesitant to allot time for medical ethics in an already crowded medical curriculum. Their perception that the discipline is soft and nonverifiable when contrasted to more technical subjects is one problem. Another is the fact that ethics rarely offers specific solutions for discrete problems and tends to raise questions rather than provide clear answers.

However, as medical practice changes in response to advances in technology, pressures from the community for a different quality of doctor-patient relationship, and political changes in health provision, doctors’ interest in the ethical aspects of their practice continues to grow in Korea too.

This paper summarizes the needs of ethics education in medical school in Korea and proposes the hopeful contents and teaching methods based on experiences of medical schools mostly in Western world.