One of the topics I went to China to discuss was our medical school’s approach to teaching medical ethics.
At Wuhan University they have a first-year course, but I was told by both the school administrators and some of the students that the material is dry and not seen of immediate importance, so students often skip the class.
Here’s how it’s structured: 27 hours of straight lectures.
No case studies, no discussions, simply a professor of policy and administration who talks to them about morality, ethics, and offers only some specifics about clinical medical issues–like end of life or reproductive health.
The faculty deans at Wuhan have accepted the idea that to improve their course, they need to make it more case-based and interactive. To that end, the students want to hear from “real” doctors discussing cases that occur in their clinical practices.
I met several practicing doctors who are interested in helping improve the course. One of them is a cardiologist who became interested in medical ethics because of her own moral distress in dealing with angry families when a patient dies. She had spent two years in the US doing research, so had some frame of reference for how things are done here. “If something bad happens to the patient, the family can always sue. In China, it is not so.”
Instead, the family might openly grieve and become angry and aggressive. She reported that doctors have been attacked by angry family members, and in one instance she knew of, killed.
In her experience, even when a patient (and their family, as surrogate decision makers) had been duly informed about the risks and benefits of the proposed procedure (e.g. cardiac cath), and then consented to it, the family still became irate when the patient died–although this was not an unexpected outcome given the gravity of the clinical situation (an acute heart attack).
A member of one family kicked her, and demanded their money back. This doctor further told me that Chinese families typically demand a refund when a patient dies in a medical setting, and that it is often given as a matter of culture.
She estimated that this occurs about one or two times out of every one hundred patient deaths.
Thus, seeking more education about ethics (and implicitly the topic of patient-doctor-family communication) has become an imperative for her.
Makes you think.
John Schumann is an internal medicine physician at the University of Chicago who blogs at GlassHospital.
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