Developing your 'ethics radar'

These are essential skills that help provide effective care for individual patients, as well as communities of patients, and you'll be expected to demonstrate competence in these skills before qualifying as a doctor. Your Foundation and Specialty training years will bring further ethical challenges to learn about, and these will be specific to your chosen specialty - a surgeon will have different ethics learning goals compared with a paediatrician.

Ethics is not a topic that can be learned once and for all in medical school. It should be ongoing throughout your career, and your ethics learning needs will be stage- and specialty-specific. Developing your 'ethics radar' will help you to identify the ethical aspects of clinical practice.

Learning about medical ethics is important because these aspects of practice are ubiquitous. They create complexity in medicine, and students and doctors are expected to learn how to manage these dimensions of practice. Diagnostic skills, while vital to safe and competent medical practice, don't make a good doctor by themselves.

By actively engaging in ethics learning throughout your medical career you'll nurture the skills you need to weigh, balance and manage these everyday ethics and make clinical practice easier for you and better for your patients.

In the study of medicine, our focus is often on the science of clinical diagnosis. Figuring out the meaning of various constellations of symptoms and signs; defining the differential diagnosis; learning which investigations will pin down the diagnosis and deciding what treatment options might be appropriate. But a clinical management plan will not be successful unless the ethical aspects involved in the consultation have also been addressed.

What do we mean by 'medical ethics'?

Medical ethics is all about values. It defines which values are morally important and explores relationships and conflicts between values in health care. Ethics defines what we, as health care professionals, ought to do and the reasons why we ought to do it.

This essentially translates into everything that we do as doctors. This includes mechanics of the doctor-patient relationship, communication skills, professionalism, obtaining consent, confidentiality, working with children, patients with psychiatric disorders or patients at the end of life, the law as it applies to medicine...the list goes on.

There are ethical dimensions to all of our consultations with patients. Often the ethical aspects occur at a subconscious level during an interaction with a patient, and it's only when there's some kind of conflict - a conflict of values - that the underlying ethical issues reach our awareness as a problematic ethical dilemma.

Why is learning about ethics important?

Medical care is becoming increasingly complex, with new and often costly technologies and treatments being made available. Society's expectations of medicine are high, as are patient expectations of care. NHS resources are increasingly stretched and the need to manage their time often puts pressure on doctors.

Doctors are also expected to take on new roles as managers and leaders, and to be able to make decisions on all these conflicting aspects of practice. The complexities of modern clinical care can lead to quite challenging ethical situations, with even the most experienced of doctors finding the ethical dimensions of clinical practice difficult to manage.

For all these reasons, as a student doctor you must have a good grounding in medical ethics and in the skills of ethical reasoning. This should include the development of the attitudes and behaviour consistent with the professional practice of medicine, as well as communication skills that will help you identify and negotiate around conflicting values.