Ethics education has been infused in each of the Allied Health Technologies Programs although the extent of that education has varied. To help support faculty with their delivery of ethics instruction, a group of representatives from the School of Allied Health of the Medical Campus of Miami-Dade Community College have been working on a two-part project that will serve as a multidiscipline approach to ethics education. One group of faculty members are in the process of designing a PowerPoint (Ethics Primer) presentation that professors can use as a foundation for instruction and/or students can use as a self-instructional tool. The second group of faculty has designed several case studies that highlight particular ethical dilemmas within a variety of health professions. The participants represented the following programs: veterinary technology, health information management, respiratory therapy, dental hygiene and medial laboratory technology.
The Dental Hygiene Program used the case study about a client with HIV that was developed through the FIPSE grant. Fifty dental hygiene students were given the case and asked to answer each step as they moved through the case study. The students were instructed to avail themselves of whatever outside resources they researched to support their responses. The reaction from the students was overwhelmingly positive. They thought the exercise was extremely educational and thought provoking. In fact, several students discussed it with their peers from the previous class and they inquired as to why they didn’t get that same opportunity the year before when they took the class.