Postgraduate - UnitAPR5729 - Clinical ethics

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2013 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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0 points, SCA Band 1, 0.000 EFTSL

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Level	Postgraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Arts
Organisational Unit	Centre for Human Bioethics
Offered	City (Melbourne) First semester 2013 (Day)
Coordinator(s)	Dr Tatjana Visak

Synopsis

This unit focuses initially on three ethical principles used to justify decisions in patient care: autonomy, beneficence, and justice. These principles are then applied to a variety of ethical issues in health care practice, such as the allocation of health care resources, the justifiability of paternalistic interventions, breaches of confidentiality, assisted reproductive technologies, surrogate motherhood, and euthanasia. The role of health professionals is also considered, in relation to issues in family care giving, and conscientious refusals to treat patients.

Outcomes

On successful completion of the unit, students should have acquired the skills to:

bring a rigorous framework of principles of health care ethics to the analysis and evaluation of certain ethical issues in patient care;
think critically about the key concepts involved in those principles;
make informed judgements about the ethics of certain ways of acting in ethically sensitive areas of patient care, and be able to defend those judgements on the basis of argument.