Residency Ethics Teaching: A Critique of Current Trends

There is a growing effort to formalize ethics teaching for medical residents. Currently, this effort is overemphasizing a single approach—the clinical ethics consultation or ethics case conference—at the expense of several other important options. While the clinical ethics approach has many benefits, it also has harmful side effects when it is made the single method for residency ethics teaching: it constricts ethics teaching within too narrow a view of medical ethics, and it forfeits an opportunity for ethics to challenge some problematic features of residency education itself.