Welcome to the online component of professional ethics course at UWC.
This website is a space for you to read, write and reflect on the topics in the course. Each student will use this space to share their thoughts on professional and ethical practice by analysing that practice through the lens of concepts discussed in the classroom. You will be writing here on the course website, commenting on the writing of other students, and using those reflections to further develop your understanding of professional ethics.
Topics
This course is arranged around topics that are relevant for the development of ethical and professional practice in healthcare. These topics are diverse and include some areas of practice that you may feel are irrelevant for you. However, even these topics provide useful opportunities for reflections on more general aspects of practice. The idea behind this course is not that you will be provided with all the content you need to learn, but that you will be presented with a series of topics that stimulate your own thinking around your personal clinical and ethical practice.
Portfolios
During this course you will develop a portfolio of learning through the writing assignments. A portfolio is a collection of evidence that demonstrates your engagement with the topics in the course, as well as any additional work you have done on your own. It is therefore not simply a repetition of the facts that you have been given but is rather meant to be an insightful, thoughtful reflection on how those facts have been, or can be, integrated into your own clinical and ethical practice. Learn more about portfolios.
About
This is an ongoing project to adapt the Professional Ethics module I teach to my South African physiotherapy students. In the past I used this website both for content (webpages on topics and links to the slides I use in class) and for student work (blogging for a portfolio assessment, with peer review and feedback). We will not be using the blogging component this year because my students are working from home, many without internet access.
This site isn’t structured as traditional course where students work through one section after another. The portfolio assessment I use aims to get students to reflect on ethical dilemmas that they experience in clinical practice and then to use the topic information on the website to inform their thinking on those dilemmas.
In other words, this may not be useful if you’re looking for a well-structured, linear progression through a series of concepts. We do discuss theories in calls (e.g. utilitarianism) but that’s not included here because I don’t want to send the message that my students have to “learn” what utilitarianism is. During the discussion on the dilemmas they face, students will invariably come to some form of, “the greatest good for the greatest number”, which is when I introduce the concept of utilitarianism to them. They are then able to use this to provide a more “academic” or philosophical framework to their descriptions of the ethical dilemmas they face.
I have yet to hear a clinician talk about how they used utilitarianism to resolve a dilemma they faced, which is why I don’t want to foreground those ideas in this course. I’m putting all this here because in my classroom this is discussed upfront and we’re all working from the same page. If you’ve come here looking for something to give your students so that they can “work through the content” then this site may not be much use to you.