Top PDF Teaching and learning of ethics in Malaysian Medical Schools: The challenges

In June 2012, the Clinical Guidance on Management of Osteoporosis Committee Working Group of the Malaysian Osteoporosis Society, under the chairmanship of Drs Chan Siew Pheng and Yeap Swan Sim, developed some very comprehensive and timely guidelines for the clinical assessment and management of osteoporosis. However, these guidelines basically attack the problem from an “ambulance at the bottom of the cliff” perspective. A seriously traumatic fracture in an elderly person inevitably results in a severe decline in quality of life: it is not practicable to effectively restore this to its status before the accident. So if rates of osteoporotic fracture and resulting morbidity are to be minimised (or hopefully to decrease), the main thrust of concern has to move from treatment to prevention. One major obstacle to achieving this is Nature herself. While the relative contributions of genetic versus

The researchers involved in this research were committed to maintaining the anonymity of the studied institutions regarding the results obtained. The research used a cross-sectional, descriptive and observational methodology through active search websites of Latin America and Caribbean universities, focusing on data referring to the course structure of medical schools, total credit hours and credit hours for ethics and bioethics, as well as teaching-learning plans. The variables were analysed and compared to each other. As for the Brazilian medical schools, we compare the academic disciplines in public and private institutions.

The proper exercise of medicine requires that the medical professional recognizes the patient as a biopsychosocial being and, for that, it becomes indispensable to improve the professional’s training in ethics and bioethics. This research was based on a comparative analysis of the ethics and bioethics discipline offered in medical schools in Brazil, Latin America and the Caribbean, considering the following variables: total hours of study, hours allocated to subjects, thematic content and if the discipline is offered as an isolated discipline, or transversally throughout the course. In summary, we obtained as a result that the workload assigned to ethics and bioethics teaching, when compared to the total course workload, was very small and presented a clear tendency to be offered in a single discipline preferably allocated in the pre-clinical training period of academic education.

The link between medical schools and the pharmaceutical industry is intricate and controversial, as the article “Medication/Drug promotion and advertizing in teaching environments: elements of the debate” clearly shows. The forms vary, including financing for research projects, sponsorship of scientific and educational events; the distribution of gifts, trips and dinners, but the purpose is singular: promotion of their products. Even optional modules are offered within medicine courses. An article by Stanley, Jackson & Barnett (2005) analyzes a discipline offered to graduate students of a medical school in England, in conjunction with a local pharmaceutical company, aimed at informing those responsible for future prescriptions of the complexity and cost of developing new therapeutic drugs, facilitating understanding of the importance of assessing new therapies and encouraging future collaboration with the industry. It seems that under the guise of a discipline is hidden an aggressive marketing strategy targeting medical students, which besides perpetuating the relationship between the industry and research and inciting consumption, aims to justify the high prices of medications as if these, indeed, resulted from investments in research and development (R&D). They should be compared with the costs of marketing and administration, which are more than double that of R&D. This, without acknowledging that since it is unclear what constitutes ‘R&D’ in the accounting balance sheets, marketing activities could be involved. One clue to this is the fact that a significant proportion of clinical trials are composed of phase IV studies. Another is that the most creative, dangerous and prolonged part of the R&D process, learning about the disease, is conducted with public funding. Only one in every 5000 potential drug

The proper exercise of medicine requires that the medical professional recognizes the patient as a biopsychosocial being and, for that, it becomes indispensable to improve the professional’s training in ethics and bioethics. This research was based on a comparative analysis of the ethics and bioethics discipline offered in medical schools in Brazil, Latin America and the Caribbean, considering the following variables: total hours of study, hours allocated to subjects, thematic content and if the discipline is offered as an isolated discipline, or transversally throughout the course. In summary, we obtained as a result that the workload assigned to ethics and bioethics teaching, when compared to the total course workload, was very small and presented a clear tendency to be offered in a single discipline preferably allocated in the pre-clinical training period of academic education.

The latest research that is currently happening, involves a survey of students’ attitudes and perceptions towards the use of business simulation computer games in teaching and learning for a business subject that is taught to students in secondary schools. This study will provide a snapshot of the current state of ICT in schools, and our informant design game development process with teachers will inform us about the challenges faced towards a better appropriation of ICT in schools. The informant game design process will also involve students as contributors of inputs for game design and to test the game pilot modules. The game authoring tool we develop will be used in a classroom project-based learning approach to create a constructivist learning environment enabled by ICT. This game authoring tool also enables scalability and sustainability of the project as teachers and students will be able to continue the development of new game modules to be used in their own classrooms, and to be shared with other schools.

Different teaching formats can contribute to the practice of ethics. In this context, we highlight important research that described experimental work to identify students’ opinions from the abortion case drama, which was attended by legal professionals and the Medical Ethics Committee. A questionnaire was applied to the viewer students to evaluate the method and the contributions to the learning. It was also asked if they would be favorable to the replication of the activity in the institution in which they study, and most considered the method valid, recommending new topics, such as sexual violence  23 , for example.

The approach in teaching statistics in medical schools is that statistics should be viewed as a tool for creating habits of self- learning in the student, for de[r]

In the middle of this apparent mismatch, some initiatives were developed to try to fulfil this gap. One of them was the establishment of a Portuguese branch of the European String Teachers Association (ESTA-Portugal). In that time, I was convinced that, in a country like Portugal where the instrumental teaching is developed and structured, this association could play a central role on the purpose previously mentioned. However, this was far from being an easy task. Although Portugal has a large number of instrumental teachers and music schools it seems for me that there was no culture of taking part in events dedicated to discussing the paradigm of the profession. After some initial attempts, we realized that there was a lack of short training for teachers based on the national system of conservatoires. Teachers complained that some institutions did not provide academic training in this field to address their questions and dilemmas, once the basis of the modules they attended, when were master students (for example), were somehow generalists; in other words, more focus on a general music education than in the particularities of the instrumental and vocal teaching. In fact, this was a situation I lived myself, even when I was a PhD candidate. It seemed that people like me, with academic training as a performer and at same time pedagogical interests, were somehow in a kind of “limbo”. For some researchers from music education, we are performers, but for others, from performance studies, we are talking about education.

Introduction: Due to scientific and technological development, Medical Education has been readjusting its focus and strategies. Medical curriculum has been adopting a vertical integration model, in which basic and clinical sciences coexist during medical instruction. This context favours the introduction of new complementary technology-based pedagogical approaches. Thus, even traditional core sciences of medical curriculum, like Anatomy, are refocusing their teaching/learning paradigm.

programs. Human research protection programs (institutional programs that provide program support including training, administration, and quality control for the human research protections functions including the institutional review boards [IRBs; research ethics committees]) should be made more effective and effi cient by (1) transagency harmonization of federal regulations, (2) accreditation of human research protection programs, (3) simplifi cation of institutional regulatory compliance processes, and (4) expanded use of central IRBs (research ethics committees) in multisite research. US regulations pertinent to translational and clinical research and compliance should be simplifi ed and harmonized between the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration. Institutions should seek accreditation for their human research protection programs: this will help establish an institutional “culture of responsibility,” lead to adoption of operating procedures that meet a national standard and are consistent across the academic medical community, and provide uniform education for faculty, trainees, and staff.

The Recommendation of the Council of Europe on Teaching and Learning about Human Rights in Schools (Committee of Ministers, 1985) enlists a number of skills that are associated with the under- standing of human rights through teaching and learning processes. In this list no explicit reference is made to critical thinking as a concept or a skill. However, the latter emerges as a requisite for the processes of teaching and learning for human rights. Critical thinking is presumed an essential element for the achievement of human rights learning and the tackling of racism, since it is directly related to the principles of ra- tionality and reason (i.e. pupils’ abilities: “to listen and discuss and to defend one’s opinions, to collect material from various sources, includ- ing the mass media and the ability to analyse it and to arrive at fair and balanced conclusions, to take responsibility, to participate in decisions, to understand the use of the mechanisms for the protection of human rights at local, regional, European and world levels” p. 2). These prin- ciples underpin all of the skills included in the list, also reflecting what was previously defined as the ideal of citizenship.

non-authoritarian professional practice, focusing on the new curricular guidelines, especially the ability to discuss and adjust treatments and interventions based on the care provided to patients. According to the author, resistance to the implementation of new guidelines is still predominant, considering the fact that it is often difficult to embrace a novelty that imposes disturbing demands to the “comfort zone” of those directly involved. However, government authorities are committed to honor them by respecting the singularities of each medical school and making better use of the resources already established 11 .

a signiicant and growing number of doctors. Gi- ven this evidence, medical schools should provide to their graduate students the basic knowledge of the acupuncture theory, scientiic evidence and the therapeutic approaches employed by this peculiar form of treatment, enabling them to clarify doubts and assist the choice of treatment options for their patients. Research conducted with British, Canadian and American students have found an important contingent of these students interested in learning about Complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) topics. 2-4

[1] Martín Abadi, Ashish Agarwal, Paul Barham, Eugene Brevdo, Zhifeng Chen, Craig Citro, Greg S. Corrado, Andy Davis, Jeffrey Dean, Matthieu Devin, Sanjay Ghemawat, Ian Good- fellow, Andrew Harp, Geoffrey Irving, Michael Isard, Yangqing Jia, Rafal Jozefowicz, Lukasz Kaiser, Manjunath Kudlur, Josh Levenberg, Dandelion Mané, Rajat Monga, Sherry Moore, Derek Murray, Chris Olah, Mike Schuster, Jonathon Shlens, Benoit Steiner, Ilya Sutskever, Kunal Talwar, Paul Tucker, Vincent Vanhoucke, Vijay Vasudevan, Fernanda Vié- gas, Oriol Vinyals, Pete Warden, Martin Wattenberg, Martin Wicke, Yuan Yu, and Xiaoqiang Zheng. TensorFlow: Large-scale machine learning on heterogeneous systems, 2015. Soft- ware available from tensorflow.org.

Haratym, Dok ł adno ć wymiarowa odlewów wykona- nych w procesie Replicast CS, Archiwum Odlewnictwa rocznik 3, nr 9, Katowice 2003.. Arendarski, Niepewno ć pomiarów, Oficyna Wydaw- nic[r]

Brazil has the world’s eighth largest economy (IMF, 2008). Nevertheless, 21.4 % of the country’s people live in poverty, and 7.3% in misery (IPEADATA, 2009). This contradiction is the result of the country’s glaring income inequality (UNDP, 2010) 1 . But, after decades remaining at a very high and stable level, inequality has recently started to decline in Brazil and in several other Latin- American countries (Lopez-Calva and Lustig, 2010). The aim of this paper is to understand the reasons behind the fall of the Brazilian inequality, using a flexible econometric approach and focusing on the role played by education and age.

A primary purpose of this survey was to assess changes in students’ attitudes and beliefs before and after as they learned about Acupuncture. Although Chinese medicine includes many modalities of tre- atments, this is an specific study considering that the elective discipline offered to medical students in our institution (Faculty of Medicine - FAMED) in- cluded only topics related to the use of acupuncture in the treatment of different diseases that afflict the human being. Therefore our students were evalua- ted at the end of the discipline “Introduction to me- dical Acupuncture”, offered twice a year to 3 rd grade

The article discusses the possibilities of using optical measurements for defining the geometric accuracy of gear wheels casts manufactured in the rapid prototyping process. The tested gear wheel prototype was cast using an aluminum alloy. The casting mould was made by means of the three-dimensional print method (3DP) with the use of a Z510 Spectrum device. The aim of the tests was to determine the geometric accuracy of the cast made by the ZCast technology in the rapid prototyping process. The tests were conducted with the use of the coordinate optical measuring method and a GOM measuring device. The prototype measurements were made in the scanning mode. The results of the measurements, saved in the STL format with the use of the scanning device software, were compared with the gear wheel 3D-CAD nominal model. The measurements enabled the determination of the real accuracy of prototypes manufactured in casting moulds by means of the ZCast technology. The selection of the measuring method was also analyzed in terms of measurement accuracy and the RP technology precision.

was based on plastic contrast. For example, to emphasize the central part among the other composition, the architect 'in the middle third of the main wall had arranged an extensive (5.60 m) but shallow (75 cm) niche‖ [16, 46p]. The building itself was small in scale, and to emphasize its monumentality and visually to expand its interior, the sculptors correlated the height of zofor (1.40 m) to 6-meter span of the building. Frieze made with account of the angle of perspective, was decorated with garlands, supported by frames of children. The images of the frieze were original in the "very understanding of the ideal of human beauty and its artistic expression in plastic forms" [44, 61p]. Often in these images there was observed a deliberate asymmetry (in the faces), the disproportion (in the figures), aimed to correct the visual angle. For the sculpture in Toprak-kala "a rhythmic repetition of similar sculptural groups, determining architectonic division of interior, was characteristic" [45]. The style and the manner of sculpture, for example, of friezes were the same as of acanthus, volutes. So, it can be assumed that the ancient sculptors have been actively involved not only in the development of sculptures, but in architectural and decorative compositions (especially of capitals), and the connection between the latters was very tight. In general, the nature of decoration of the premises depended on the functions of the latter: "household and service rooms were modestly furnished, as for residential and ceremonial rooms they were finished with the appropriate splendor‖ [46, 67p]. The sculpture, obeying the architecture, served as an element of its design. In Bactria a monumental sculpture "was designed primarily to be installed in the temples" [22, 901p]. In architectural