The Value of Ethics Education in Surgical Training

Although ethics is not a new concept in the surgical care of patients, the focused attention to ethics education in surgical education is a recent phenomenon. As more options have become available in the treatment armamentarium of surgery, the central question of surgical care has changed from “What can be done for this patient?” to the more modern question, “What should be done for this patient?” To answer this question, surgeons must attend to patients’ values and preferences. Surgical residents also spend much less time in the hospital today than they did several decades ago, increasing the necessity of focused attention to ethics education. Finally, with the shift to more outpatient care, surgical residents have fewer opportunities to engage in many of the important discussions about diagnosis and prognosis with patients. These factors have made ethics education in surgical training programs more important today than in previous decades.