How does the institutional consciousness of bioethics influence determine its agenda?: Medical education

Abstract

In the Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, bioethics is defined as, "While medical and other healthcare ethics are a major component of bioethics, the latter is now widely acknowledged to extend well beyond healthcare ethics to include not only the ethics of researches in the life sciences but also environmental sciences, ethical issues of sexuality, reproduction, genetics, and population, and various sociopolitical moral issues, including the adverse effects oil people's health of unemployment, poverty, discrimination, crime, war, and torture". Although it is a relatively new discipline, bioethics covers a vast area with contributions from medical ethics, philosophy, sociology etc. Generalizing on various bioethics studies throughout the world, it is possible to see that studies from Western cultures are especially concentrating on certain issues such as euthanasia, beginning of life, genetics, and autonomy. In addition to the similarities, studies originating from other geographical and cultural environments also include ethical problems due to the privatization of national health care systems. In Turkey, studies on bioethics suffer from a lack of disassociation with practical health care services and policies, actual problems of the academia and medical education, and this situation limits the agenda to individual relationships. Raising institutional awareness and defining the context properly seems necessary. in order to expand the agenda and to deal with real problems, One of the most important things to be done is to take into consideration, both in subject selection and ethical analysis, the various, direct and indirect determinants of daily life that effect people's health. This is a necessity, that derives from the definition of bioethics itself.