Longitudinal small-group learning during the first clinical year.

Background And Objectives: Ethics education for medical students has included a number of relatively vague descriptions of appropriate curricular objectives, but medical schools struggle with the general teaching of ethics, as well as with presenting the ethical dilemmas posed by managed care. This paper proposes some standards and uses them to analyze the general and managed care ethics content of the Undergraduate Medical Education for the 21st Century (UME-21) curricula.

Methods: We analyzed progress and final reports from each school to define their learning objectives, content, teaching methods, and evaluation strategies in ethics.