| Sumario: | The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the process by which physiotherapy (PT) students make choices to pursue learning related to ethics in a problem-based physiotherapy curriculum and to examine the factors that influenced those choices. Three randomly selected tutorial groups of PT students (n=17) and their faculty tutors were observed and audiotaped as they studied a health care problem with ethical issues embedded in the presentation. Two weeks following study of the problem, focus groups were held with the tutorial groups and two faculty tutors participated in a semi-structured interview. Students also completed a questionnaire asking them to recall and rank the importance of their learning issues. Learning issues related to pathology and treatment were recalled by all students and ranked high in importance. Content analysis of transcripts identified four barriers to learning: lack of language to describe ethics, student perception that ethics is a low priority for learning and a difficult subject to research and students' lack of clinical experience to appreciate the relevance of the content. In a problem-based curriculum faculty need to incorporate strategies to encourage valuing of ethics, including providing students and tutors with the language to discuss ethics, training of tutors and highlighting the clinical relevance of ethics early in the curriculum.
|
|---|