Apart from Hungarian university instructors, representatives of partner institutions from Spain, Turkey, Switzerland, and the Netherlands took part in the two-day academic exchange hosted by the local Department of Behavioral Sciences on best practices in teaching, innovations, and insights in the field of bioethics education.
The international network called Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education was established three years ago with the purpose of making it possible for educators from the participating countries to share their information and develop mutual projects to further how bioethics is taught innovatively in universities, hospitals, and for the general public. The Hungarian working group is hosted by the Department of Behavioral Sciences of the Faculty of Public Health at the University of Debrecen.
“The cooperation between working groups whose focus is on bioethics education is extremely important, as the possibilities available in medical science and biology for changing the quality of human life have been expanded to a great extent recently. As regards the relevant dilemmas, the only potential responses to them should be based upon long and thorough series of consultations,” said Department Head Karolina Kósa in her welcoming address delivered at the meeting, following which she recalled a recent case in which a fourteen-year-old British girl suffering from cancer had won a lawsuit filed against her parents because they had not given their unanimous consent to her wish of getting her body cryogenically frozen by a US company to be brought back to life in two hundred years when a cure for cancer has already been found. There has not been any example to date of anyone frozen in such a way who would have been brought back to life.
At the University of Debrecen, there is an expansive choice of taking courses in bioethics education in the entire range of offerings in medical science, as the topic comes up invariably in classes given to students in general medicine and dentistry as well as in pharmacy or MA-level programs in medical science.
“We have included a course based upon the analyses of practical ethics case studies into our program offered to students of general medicine, and we even have a bioethics film course, in which our goal is to involve students with little former exposure to ethics issues, for which purpose film seems to be an excellent medium,” said conference organizer Péter Kakuk, Assistant Professor at the Department of Behavioral Sciences about the methods used in bioethics education at the University of Debrecen.
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