The narrative approach in teaching medical ethics: the Turkish experience.

The Deontology and Medical History Departments in Turkey teach Medical Ethics Education. These departments were first established by medical historians and for the time being the staff is primarily interested in deontology. The Department of Deontology in the Faculty of Medicine at Ankara University is the first department in Turkey to teach medical ethics. In 1974, issues including medical ethics were included in the current curriculum for the Medical Deontology and Medical History Course, but without changing the title of the course. Since then, different scholars have used different teaching methods. In this paper, a very new teaching strategy and technique used by the author will be discussed. In Turkey, the main resources being used as teaching materials in medical ethics are books and periodicals of mainly Western European and North American origin. Cultural, religious, and traditional characteristics of Turkey differ a great deal, so these texts need to be modified. This modification is hard to accomplish, because discourse on authentic values and value systems is inadequate. Also, this way of thinking about values is alien to most medical students. A narrative approach in teaching medical ethics aims to introduce local values that affect medical practice to first year medical students of the Faculty of Medicine at Ankara University, by searching for those values in literary texts and case histories. Besides introducing local values, some of our main goals are to encourage students to develop a sensitivity towards ethical issues and to teach them the methodology of ethical thinking. This is still a pilot study that covers only four hours of a thirty-hour program (two-hour sessions, twice in one semester), but some conclusions can be drawn. In this presentation, some information about the content and the structure of the course will be given, and the positive and negative results about the narrative approach will be discussed, arising from our limited local experience.