Teaching Bioethics in medical Schools in Latin America

Abstract The proper exercise of medicine requires that the medical professional recognizes the patient as a biopsychosocial being and, for that, it becomes indispensable to improve the professional’s training in ethics and bioethics. This research was based on a comparative analysis of the ethics and bioethics discipline offered in medical schools in Brazil, Latin America and the Caribbean, considering the following variables: total hours of study, hours allocated to subjects, thematic content and if the discipline is offered as an isolated discipline, or transversally throughout the course. In summary, we obtained as a result that the workload assigned to ethics and bioethics teaching, when compared to the total course workload, was very small and presented a clear tendency to be offered in a single discipline preferably allocated in the pre-clinical training period of academic education.