Curriculum
The humanities and ethics courses at UT Health Science Center San Antonio are integrated into all four years of the Medical School curriculum. They are required courses and clinical in their orientation.
Sessions related to their classroom studies in the second year and clinical experiences in their third year, as well as electives and selectives in all four years, increase their awareness. A major segment late in their final year is designed to reinforce their roles as caring physicians and to prepare them for their transition to residency and major hospital and clinic responsibilities.
First Year Beginning with their first day of medical school, students are exposed to selections in the humanities that broaden and deepen their view of life and death. First-year students are taught the cardinal principles of ethics - justice, autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence - and learn about the experience of illness. The course is broad -- students write a narrative of illness and give formal presentations on an ethic case analysis. Film, story and narrative and a rich choice of readings guide their development. |
Second Year Second-year students, in their progression from one module to another in an organ-based learning system, examine interdisciplinary relationships and their impact on the experience of illness. Medical students are asked to join nursing students in the classroom for a presentation by a panel of individuals living with chronic illness. |
Third Year During their clinical rotations in their third year, the emphasis is on professional rolemodeling and students and their professors discuss cases in the wards to help them to a practical and greater depth of understanding of ethical principles and practices, such as informed consent and advance directives. Their clinical coursework is enriched with monthly Ethics Bites seminars where presenters lead students in discussions about real ethics cases. |
Fourth Year The fourth-year course, in particular, prepares students for their new lives as interns through intensive readings on end-of-life issues and chronic illness, the prevalence of physician addiction and suicide, medical errors and the practical application of ethical decision-making in situations they will face on a daily basis on the wards and in their practices. |
