TEACHING MEDICAL-ETHICS TO ORTHOPEDIC-SURGERY RESIDENTS

Orthopaedic surgery residents will be faced with a variety of ethical issues when they enter clinical practice. A previous survey suggested that they lack knowledge about how to approach several types of medica l ethics dilemmas; We developed a medical ethics curriculum for orthop aedic surgery residents and presented it over a one-year period to the residents in one training program, The effect of the educational inte rvention on the residents' knowledge of medical ethics and their abili ty to handle hypothetical situations was measured by comparing their r esponses to a questionnaire, administered before and after the interve ntion, with those of residents in a training program in which the inte rvention was not provided. The twenty-five residents at the site of th e educational intervention had a mean improvement of 0.10 in the overa ll score, from a mean score of 0.71 on the baseline survey to a mean s core of 0.81 on the followup survey. This improvement was significantl y greater than the mean improvement of 0.02 for the thirty residents a t the control site, who had a mean score of 0.72 on the baseline surve y and a mean score of 0.74 on the follow-up survey (p = 0,002), Six re sidents who participated in the medical ethics curriculum rated it as very useful; seventeen, as somewhat useful; one, as slightly useful; a nd one, as not at all useful, A medical ethics curriculum can increase orthopaedic residents' knowledge of medical ethics. Whether this curr iculum also will lead to behavioral changes requires additional evalua tion.