Category: Ethics
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PHT402: What is the value of a human life?
This is my fourth contribution to a series of weekly posts related to the #pht402 Professional Ethics course. This week’s topic is specifically about torture, but the general principle concerns the rights of the individual vs the rights of society, as well as asking about the relative value of a human life. I’m going to…
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PHT402: Equality and discrimination
This is my third post as a participant in the #pht402 Professional Ethics course. The topic for this week is equality and whether or not we really are equal in a society that discriminates on many levels. It’s important to understand that equal in this context means equal before the law. No-one is suggesting that we…
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PHT402 online course accreditation
The #pht402 Professional Ethics course has just been accredited by the South African Society of Physiotherapists and Health Professions Council of South Africa for 6 Level 2 Ethics CPD points. If you are a South African physiotherapist and would like to take part in the course, please register here before 9th August. Over the past…
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How learning is happening in the PHT402 ethics course
I wanted to give an example of how interactions in the course are having unintended effects, which is really the whole point of this kind of course. It’s not always evident to participants that their thinking and writing have a real, tangible effect on how others think about the world. The consequences of the things…
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Constructing a blog post for the PHT402 Ethics course
This is a post for participants in the #pht402 Professional Ethics online course being run by the University of the Western Cape and Physiopedia. Many of our participants have little or no blogging experience, so this post is intended to provide some suggestions and resources that may be useful when learning how to write your…
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Open, online course on Professional Ethics
I’ve been wanting to run an open, online course for a while and have finally managed to put something together in collaboration with Physiopedia. I’m interested in exploring new conceptions of curriculum and what it means to teachers and learners when we do something different. How would learning change if the learners decided on the…
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Objectifying students in the same way we objectify patients
What is it about the way we teach that sets up behaviours in our students for the way that they practice? I noticed that many of our students don’t consciously think of their patients as fully human beings. I don’t think it’s intentional, or that they’re disrespecting the patients…they just don’t think of them as…
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Is violence in society decreasing over time?
This weekend I came across an interesting TED talk by Steven Pinker, where he identifies a decreasing trend in violence, which is somewhat surprising when you think about how violent the world is. He supports the idea with some examples which seem reasonable, although some of the comments highlight that the evidence seems to have…
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Developing compassion and empathy as part of a Professional Ethics module
I’ve been spending some time this week working with our 4th year students in the Professional Ethics module. One of our biggest challenges is that our students (and most other students in healthcare programmes) see characteristics like compassion, empathy, courage, shame, and emotional response as something that they need to “have”, like a stethoscope or…
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CHEC course: teaching and learning (day 3)
Yesterday’s CHEC session was presented by Jeff Jawitz from UCT, who looked at tools for addressing diversity in the South African university classroom. I’ve seen Jeff present before at conferences and he’s got a really relaxed way of introducing and working with often highly controversial topics, like race and gender. I was especially excited to…