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Medical Ethics In Beer-sheva
Frank (Yeruham) Leavitt*
* Ph.D., Centre for Asian and International Bioethics, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel
Our Faculty of Health Sciences teaches medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, paramedics, public health, medical management, sociology of health, epidemiology, occupational medicine, and the basic sciences, including immunology, virology, neurobiology and laboratory medicine, physiology, morphology, etc. Health science is a matter of teamwork. Each specialty, with its ethics, is equally important. Encouraging nurses, for example, to be aware of ethical problems, and not to be afraid to speak out, is as essential to ethical health care as is teaching doctors.
It is more important to encourage all members of the team to think deeply, to take responsibility for ethical decision making, and to listen openly to the their patients, than it is to try to train "hospital ethicists" as is done in the West. Our ethics programme for MD students includes: Ethics lectures in pre-first year summer course; First year ethics elective; Philosophy for Medical Students; Ethics for an integrated group of students from Nursing, Physiotherapy, Paramedics, and Medicine; Ethics discussion sessions in clinical rounds; Sixth-year Physician and Society; Evening lecture series.
Our humanitarian projects for the medically deprived of the world are integral to our approach to bioethics. We would like to work together with our Turkish friends in humanitarian projects. The greatest failure of bioethics, however, is our failure to address and solve problems of dishonesty in the health professions.Keywords: Health Sciences; Bioethics; Ethics educationT Klin J Med Ethics 2001, 9:13-19
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