Imparting medical ethics: the role of mentorship in clinical training

Abstract

Mentoring and ethics are integral and intersecting components of medical education. Faculty workloads and diffusion of responsibility for teaching impact both ethics and mentoring. In current academic medical center environments, the expectation that traditional one‐on‐one mentoring relationships will arise spontaneously between medical students and faculty may be unrealistic. Alternative curricula serve as examples for how to address mentoring and bioethics needs of medical students in the context of relationships with faculty and peers. To assess how ethics and mentoring affect students, faculty, and patient care, methods to monitor and evaluate their impact on student development and treatment outcomes are needed. We believe embedding and monitoring mentoring and ethics in the curriculum will facilitate the nurturance and welfare of medical students.