Medical ethics and law for doctors of tomorrow: the 1998 Consensus Statement updated

TLDR

Medical ethics and law are essential to clinical practice, and the UK General Medical Council requires medical graduates to understand and comply with ethical guidance, mandating adequate teaching time and resources in all medical schools. The paper argues that medical ethics, law, and professionalism must be fully integrated into all curricula, with a dedicated senior academic to ensure adequate teaching, and presents an updated core content framework. Implementation requires appointing at least one full‑time senior academic in ethics and law and follows a consultative process that produced the updated core content for UK medical schools.

Abstract

Knowledge of the ethical and legal basis of medicine is as essential to clinical practice as an understanding of basic medical sciences. In the UK, the General Medical Council (GMC) requires that medical graduates behave according to ethical and legal principles and must know about and comply with the GMC's ethical guidance and standards. We suggest that these standards can only be achieved when the teaching and learning of medical ethics, law and professionalism are fundamental to, and thoroughly integrated both vertically and horizontally throughout, the curricula of all medical schools as a shared obligation of all teachers. The GMC also requires that each medical school provides adequate teaching time and resources to achieve the above. We reiterate that the adequate provision and coordination of teaching and learning of ethics and law requires at least one full-time senior academic in ethics and law with relevant professional and academic expertise. In this paper we set out an updated indicative core content of learning for medical ethics and law in UK medical schools and describe its origins and the consultative process by which it was achieved.