Prematurity is the leading cause of infant mortality and one of the main reasons for newborn infants to be admitted to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Advancements in medicine has made the NICU a maze of sophisticated modern technology and expensive to run. These advances in technology have also resulted in an added layer of complexity to many ethical dilemmas that are encountered in the NICU. In 1977, Beauchamp and Childress introduced the principles of biomedical ethics. These four principles of (1)respect for autonomy, (2)nonmaleficence, (3)beneficence and (4)justice, form a suitable starting point for the analysis of the moral challenges of medical innovation. This article explores how the four ethical principles relate to decision-making in the NICU, and how they can be applied to the treatment of sick newborn infants in clinical practice. It also highlights the reasons why healthcare personnel need to equip themselves with good communication skills and up to date knowledge of ethical considerations in the NICU in order to make quality decisions about care for their patients. This article also suggests that a Clinical Ethics Committee can play a vital role in ensuring that the best decisions are achieved for these patients.
This article argues that environmental considerations fall within the scope of medical bioethics, and there are implications specific to medical education. It endorses the need to expand the scope and epistemology of contemporary medical bioethics discourse by including themes related to environmental considerations. Our discussion begins by providing a brief history of environmental bioethics. It then offers a critique of three specific health and environmental issues, namely technology, toxics, and consumption, and discusses how these issues are key to articulating moral considerations of human health and subsequently medicine and its teaching. Lastly, it explores criticisms of including environmental issues into the bioethical debate before providing suggestions of how environmental ethics can be included into the medical curriculum. This article concludes by suggesting theoretical possibilities for environmentally inclusive bioethics, such as reorienting bioethical discussions to its original environmental advocacy and supporting environmental bioethics as a competency in medical education.
Appreciation of learning styles can be of use to help both educators and students to enhance the effectiveness of an educational experience. It has been noticed that some students at this College are not very good at expressing themselves in either written or spoken English. Our study aimed to identify the student’s learning styles; assess whether there is any correlation between learning style, baseline demographic data and self rated proficiency in English language; and assess their associations with the assessment performance.
A group of third year medical students voluntarily participated in a questionnaire study to provide us with their learning styles, demographic information and self-rated proficiency in English language. This data was compared to the students’ performance in the assessment at the end of their junior clinical rotations.
This cohort of students (60% Malay, 35% Chinese and 5% Indian) who were mostly visual learners, considered themselves proficient in English. Students with predominantly Visual learning styles and those with poorer English, score significantly lower during their clinical long case examinations. These two predictors appear to be independent of each other.
These results may suggest that our current teaching modalities may disadvantage students with predominant visual learning styles. It also suggests that the long case clinical examination may favour those with more verbal learning styles.
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised challenges in dealing with information sharing by the public and the authorities. There are two categories of information sharing on social media that are believed to be potentially problematic and unethical: the sharing of personal information of patients and the sharing of fake news or false information. We present a discussion on how the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia can be ethically handled in terms of information sharing. It is recommended that the public should cultivate the basic skills to evaluate information and determine its validity. On the other hand, the authorities should refrain from placing the blame on patients to avoid them from being stigmatized. It is crucial that all parties are aware of their ethical duty to ensure only ethical and valid information gets shared on social media.