Course description

Focusing on the continuing impact and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination campaigns, this course will engage students with the ethical, professional, and social frameworks in which clinical medicine is practised, and with the debates that typically raise ethical and moral dilemmas within these frameworks. Concepts and theories introduced in EPP1 are drawn on and applied to a number of clinical areas in medicine, especially those that have accompanied COVID-19 and its management, globally, nationally and state-wide. Over the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a focus on the ethics of permitted coercion and vaccination, on the inculcation of fear, of political intervention and the moral position of exercising autonomy and human rights. In examining these issues, students will have the opportunity to debate, to journal their own moral reasoning and biases, and to consider the future course of COVID-19 as emerging medical professionals. The course will be delivered via a combination of face-to-face lectures and discussion groups, utilising web-based materials.

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