A study published in the October issue of the Journal of Dental Education reports ethics has declined in dentistry. Shocking! In fact, what actually qualifies as “ethics” education seems to have changed. Shocking! This information was developed by the authors, listed below and administered by the American Society for Dental Ethics. American Society of Dental Ethics!? Who knew?!
I’m wondering if this “Ethics Society” was the impetus to the decline in and redefining of ethics education. Wonder what kind of influence the dental mills and the Dental Group Practice Association (DGPA ) (see below) have of the ethics curriculum? Ethics is something the mills certainly do not want practiced, it hinders production!
Jurisprudence must be in worse shape than ethics, considering all the illegal dental mills openly operating these days! I wonder if there is an American Society of Dental Jurisprudence?
This study was done with data from 2008. 2011 is damn near over!!
Now on with the abstract of the Study:
Abstract:
The survey was sent to the individual who directs the ethics curriculum at the fifty-six U.S. dental schools that had a full complement of enrolled pre-doctoral little time is devoted to ethics instruction in the formal curriculum.classes as of January 2008.
All fifty-six schools responded to the survey. The data suggest that, in general, little time is devoted to ethics instruction in the formal curriculum. The mean number of contact hours of ethics instruction is 26.5 hours, which represents about 0.5 percent of the mean clock hours of instruction for dental education programs reported in the most recent American Dental Association survey of dental education. While the amount of time devoted to ethics instruction appears not to have changed much over the past thirty years, what has changed are what qualifies as ethics instructionwhat has changed are what qualities as ethics instruction, the pedagogies used, and the development and availability of norm-referenced learning outcomes assessments, which are currently used by a number of schools.
