Medical Students’ Attitudes Towards Ethical Issues Encountered in Clerkship Rotation

Clerkship rotation is one of the most important phases in medical education. In this phase, medical students learn authentically under a health practitioner how to treat patients in a full context, and in the process, they will encounter various ethical or professional problems that arise during the learning. This study was conducted to examine the attitudes of medical students relating to ethical issues while participating in the clerkship rotation. In addition, a phenomenology methods with in-depth interviews was used to find out students’ feelings, judgments and wishes toward ethical issues encountered in clerkship rotation and how they deal with the situation. The subjects were 10 medical students that at least had attended 4 departments in clerkship rotation. The result showed that students have decided to remain silent on ethical issues. Instead of criticizing, they prefer to question the situation with the doctors or discuss it with other students. Aside being felt as vulnerable groups because their future (graduation) were determined by the doctors, they chose to remain silent for some reasons. Hierarchy was the major problem to communicate the feeling of inconvenience in dealing with ethical issues. The second reason was group conformity, student can reduce the discomfort feelings when everyone else seemed not to care. They also noted that they became indifferent as to the effect of burnout on thinking about the same situation all the times. The courage to discuss the situation commonly depends on the characteristics of the doctors. Although students chose to remain silent in facing ethical issues in clerkship rotation, it was evident that they were learning, absorbing and more aware of what they were observing.