Fallacious, misleading and unhelpful:The case for removing ‘systematic review’ from bioethics nomenclature

Attempts to conduct systematic reviews of ethical arguments in bioethics are fundamentally misguided. All areas of enquiry need thorough and informative literature reviews, and efforts to bring transparency and systematic methods to bioethics are to be welcomed. Nevertheless, the raw materials of bioethical articles are not suited to methods of systematic review. The eclecticism of philosophy may lead to suspicion of philosophical methods in bioethics. Because bioethics aims to influence medical and scientific practice it is tempting to adopt scientific language and methods. One manifestation is the increasing innovation in, and use of, systematic reviews of ethical arguments in bioethics. Yet bioethics, as a broadly philosophical area of enquiry, is unsuited to systematic review. Bioethical arguments are evaluative, so notions of quality and bias are inapplicable. Bioethical argument is conceptual rather than numerical, and the classification of concepts is itself a process of argument that cannot aspire to neutrality. Any ‘systematic review’ of ethical arguments in bioethics thus falls short of that name. Furthermore, labels matter. Although the bioethics research community may find that adopting the language and the outward methods of clinical science offers apparent prospects of credibility, policy influence and funding, we argue that such misdirection carries risks and is unlikely to pay dividends in the long term. Bioethical sources are amenable to the review methods of the social sciences, and it is on these methods that specific methods of bioethics literature review should be built

Teaching Medical Humanities in Medical Schools with Open Education Resources

In this chapter we will explore various ways in which open education resources might be utilised in the teaching of medical humanities in medical schools. Open education resources are generic open access materials in a particular field, which can be used by educators and students alike to support teaching and learning. They might be particularly useful when an institution lacks staff with specific expertise to teach essential but ‘minority’ subjects. The open and generic nature of these resources almost always means that they can be used flexibly to suit the teaching and learning contexts in which they are used. However, that same generic character means that they will be rarely directed towards specific learning outcomes, and therefore educators might struggle to fit them into teaching programmes, or have to alter their own learning outcomes and curricula in order to fit the resources available.Here, we outline and reflect upon different ways we have used open access medical humanities materials developed by the ALCMAEON project to support teaching in UK medical programmes the medical schools at the University of Bristol and University of St Andrews respectively. We begin by discussing the difficulties often encountered in teaching medical humanities in the crowded medical curriculum, before outlining what open education resources are and how they can help, with particular reference to the ALCMAEON project. We then outline and reflect on three different ways in which the ALCMAEON resources have been used to support teaching and learning with medical humanities, and consider the wider lessons we can draw from that experience about the use and development of open education resources to support learning and teaching of ‘minority’ subjects in medical curricula.<br/

Inclusivity in TAS research:An example of EDI as RRI

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) aims to achieve the goal of making research activities responsible and ethical. To those ends, it is vital for researchers to actively engage with equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) which, if not attended to, may detrimentally affect both potential research participants and the research itself. Our paper offers an account of our ongoing discussions surrounding the importance of EDI when designing our research, how we employed EDI to intentionally make our recruitment process more inclusive, and our ongoing planning to make all our research activities as inclusive, diverse, and accessible as possible. There is no one-size-fits-all approach for adopting EDI principles in RRI, however, we posit that their consideration is essential for research communities who wish their work to represent the perspectives of those who will be affected by future novel technologies