Teaching for programme students
Responsibility is key in practicing medicine, nursing, engineering and any other profession. The responsibility is professional, but it also has ethical and legal perspectives. We want to help students develop their ability to understand how ethical and legal issues arise in practice. We also give students the opportunity to practice their critical skills: analysing ethical and legal problems, finding the relationship between them and arguing for different views.
We teach future nurses, doctors, biologists and engineers at Uppsala University. Our aim is to help our students develop the competence they need to identify the values that are at stake when they face ethical dilemmas in their future professions.
Ethics and law for medicine
To practice medicine involves considerable responsibility, both from a medical, ethical as well as from a legal perspective. The main aim of the curriculum is to enhance student’s ability to understand how ethical and legal issues arise within the medical practice and their critical skills in analyse ethical and legal problems, the relation between them, and to argue in for different views in particular cases.
For medical doctors, medical ethics and medical law is part of the professional training curriculum that runs through the programme from the first to the eleventh semester. Lectures and seminars are integrated with courses in medicine, and taught collectively by clinicians, lawyers and ethicists.
Contact: Deputy Senior Lecturer Jessica Nihlén-Fahlquist
Nursing
Within the nurse's programme, the ethics training is distributed over the three years of the programme.
The ethical dilemmas nurses face can concern the conflict between a patient’s right to be autonomous and consent to care on the one hand, and the nurse’s will and duty to do something good for the patient and maximize the beneficence of the actions taken on the other. The students are encouraged to reflect on different solutions and to actively take part in moral deliberations.
Ethics is an important part of the providing of good nursing care and ethical competence is crucial in a nurse’s practice. To be ethically competent means being able to identify moral dilemmas and to reflect on the values involved and how they should be weighed. It also implies being able to act upon the morally preferable action.
Nursing students listen to lectures, both live and on the web, and participate in seminars where they can discuss clinical ethical dilemmas. Examination is mostly in form of written assignments and mandatory seminars.
Contact: Senior lecturer Anna T. Höglund
Midwifes
Within the midwife programme we lecture on for example professional ethics for midwifes, abortion ethics and the ethics of pre-natal diagnostics.
Contact: Senior lecturer Anna T. Höglund
Molecular biotechnology
The ethics track on the molecular biotechnology programme includes issues related to engineering ethics, technology ethics, risk ethics and environmental ethics. The subject of ethics is introduced on the first course and in the last semester of the program, the students make an ethical analysis of their independent projects.
Contact: Deputy Senior Lecturer Jessica Nihlén-Fahlquist
Specialist nurses
In the specialist nurse programmes we offer tailored lectures for specialities such as intensive care, palliative care, primary care, psychiatric care and surgery.
Contact: Senior lecturer Anna T. Höglund