Course description

At Manchester, we provide the highest quality of education in healthcare ethics and healthcare law for you.

This course compliments your medical degree, giving you the opportunity to study the in-depth moral and legal issues that you will face as a medic or researcher.

While identifying the ethical and legally problematic aspects of practice, you will learn to formulate ethically acceptable solutions in challenging circumstances.

On completion of the course, you will have a comprehensive understanding of the principles of medical ethics and law, and will have developed a full conceptual toolkit that has been informed by both disciplines.

Aims

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

Apply the concepts you have learned to real-world situations, both familiar and unforeseen.
Identify the ethically and legally problematic aspects of practice; and be able to suggest ways to minimise, solve, or avoid those problems.
You will also, through the dissertation element of the course, have refined the ability to make and sustain a prolonged and sophisticated argument on a topic of interest.

Special features

Specially-structured course for medical students to widen their understanding ethical challenges featuring interactive lectures and prominent guest speakers.

Teaching and learning

Teaching will be mainly by interactive lecture. Each course unit will be taught in two-hour teaching blocks; these are run as a hybrid of traditional lecture and discussion.

You will be encouraged to play an active role in these lectures. Additionally, you have the opportunity to attend weekly papers on current research and developments in the field given by either members of staff or a visiting speaker.

During the course, you will be expected to complete six taught course units and a dissertation. All taught units are to be assessed by an essay of 4,000 words (for course units to the value of 15 credits) or assignments totalling 6,000 words (for course units to the value of 30 credits).

The dissertation will be between 10,000-12000 words. This dissertation will represent a major piece of independent research and you will be able to present your own papers to the rest of your cohort based on your dissertation as it progresses during semester two.

Coursework and assessment

All taught course units will be assessed by written coursework, which allows for extended argument and analysis. Some semester one units require two pieces of work; for these, the deadlines will be in November and January.

The deadline for semester one courses assessed by one piece of coursework, will be January. The semester two deadline will be in May/June. Assessment by coursework alone will allow for extended analysis and argument.

Career opportunities

The Healthcare Ethics and Law course better equips you to solve ethico-legal dilemmas that you will meet on the ward or, more importantly, perhaps - simply to spot them.

Increasingly, medical researchers have to demonstrate compliance with certain ethical demands, and so an intercalated degree in ethics and law will be useful when it comes to planning research.

Studying with us will reflect interests and concerns that most people have anyway, whether they know it or not. On completion of the course, you will have a comprehensive understanding of the mechanics of medical ethics and medical law and a full conceptual toolkit that can be applied to both disciplines.