The emerging trends of healthcare professions’ ethics education in recent 10 years: a systematic review

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent trends in healthcare ethics education, highlighting the need for standardized teaching and the role of AI in future ethics training.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel integrative framework and identifies emerging themes in medical ethics education.

Findings

Competency-based ethics education was the most frequently discussed topic (55.86% of studies).

Virtues-based ethics education showed a strong relationship with professionalism (12.41% of studies).

The concept of mutual safety was emphasized as a new role in healthcare ethics education.

Abstract

Because of globalization and advancement of AI technology, the trends of healthcare professions’ ethics education have changed significantly. However, the available literature reviews may not reflect current trends, lacking consistency in the teaching topics, and assessment standards of ethics education. Furthermore, no systematic review has examined the relationship between different medical ethics education topics.

To fill these gaps, it is a key point that medical educators and institutions work toward establishing a standardized and comprehensive framework for medical ethics education. In this case, this research aimed to provide a comprehensive review of the academic research surrounding medical ethics education for medical students and professions.

A systematic search following PRISMA guidelines conducted across databases, including PubMed and Web of Science for recent papers published on medical ethics education from 2015 to 2025. Post-screening, 145 studies met the final criteria.

145 studies were included in the current review. Four core themes were identified: virtues-based ethics education, competency-based ethics education, professionalism, and mutual safety. Results indicated that competency-based ethics education was the area most frequently discussed in the publications (N = 81, 55.86%). There were interrelationships exist among the four themes, particularly between virtues-based ethics education and professionalism (N = 18, 12.41%). This study also introduced a novel integrative framework and emphasized the new role of mutual safety, which can enhance healthcare professions’ ethics and clinical practice.

Medical ethics education plays an important role in clinical practice and moral decision-making. This review highlights the need for a standardized, multidimensional approach to understand the emerging trends of healthcare professions’ ethics education, which will be helpful for AI education in medical ethics education in the future.

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