Published 29 December 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a2884
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a2884

Analysis

Ethical debate

Students whose behaviour causes concern: Role of universities

¹ Brighton and Sussex Medical School, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9PX

What should you do when you see a fellow student behaving inappropriately? After a group of students wrote to the BMJ about their experience during an elective (doi:10.1136/bmj.a2874), we sought the opinions of an ethicist (doi:10.1136/bmj.a2882), a dean, a GMC representative (doi:10.1136/bmj.a2876), and a lecturer from an African university (doi:10.1136/bmj.a2875)

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The behaviour of the student described in this report is clearly unacceptable and worrying. If this was one of our students I would want to know and I would take urgent steps to understand exactly what had been happening and then either provide help through student support mechanisms or, if necessary, invoke fitness to practise procedures. Equally, had the students faced with this difficulty been from our school, I hope that we would have mechanisms in place that would allow them to report their concerns and, just as importantly, that they understood what their professional responsibilities were in situations like this.

Dealing with poor or unsafe performance in colleagues is an uncomfortable process. The situation described by these students could have equally taken place in UK medical practice, although the distant setting and the fact that there was no one immediately obvious to whom they could report their concerns no . . . [Full text of this article]

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    StumbleUpon    Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Articles

Students whose behaviour causes concern: Case history
BMJ 2008 337: a2874. [Extract] [Full Text]

Students whose behaviour causes concern: Am I my brother’s keeper?

Moses Galukande
BMJ 2008 337: a2875. [Extract] [Full Text]

Students whose behaviour causes concern: The GMC’s view

Joan Trowell
BMJ 2008 337: a2876. [Extract] [Full Text]

Students whose behaviour causes concern: Ethical perspective

Deborah Bowman
BMJ 2008 337: a2882. [Extract] [Full Text]

Online poll

Find out more on doc2doc >>