How is medical practice and decision-making influenced by bioethics, law and health policy? This module considers the legal regulation of medical practice in its ethical, socio-legal, and historical contexts, by drawing on a range of critical, legal, bioethical, and interdisciplinary perspectives. You’ll learn about dominant traditions of bioethical theory and the major principles of medical law. Your knowledge and critical legal abilities will develop through discussions of ethical concepts and theories like consequentialism, altruism, care ethics, deontology, justice, autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and care ethics. You’ll learn to critically analyse legal, social, and ethical tensions confronting the courts, legal scholars, and clinicians as they negotiate medical resource allocation decision-making, consent to treatment and capacity issues, medical negligence, confidentiality, and clinical research. Each week, your knowledge and critical law abilities will be developed through participation in critical legal and bioethical analysis of significant medical law cases, seminar discussions and examination of applied examples of how ethical and bioethical concepts and theories impact legal and medical decision-making, public inquiries, law reform and bioethical discourse. Module content will respond to changes in law, health policy and bioethics and to changes in health care services resulting from, for example: pandemics, NHS resourcing issues, public investigations into maternal negligence and advances in medical research.
Lecture / Module Hour -16 hours
Workshop / Seminar- 16 hours
Independent Study - 118 hours
Assessment Preparation - 50 hours
Written -Short writing piece - Briefing note -1300 words - Weighting 40%
Written -Short writing piece - Briefing note -1300 words - Weighting 60%
Reassessment methods : Like for like
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On successfully completing the module, students will be able to:
1. Apply a comprehensive and deep understanding of health law and medical ethical concepts to complex legal and health policy questions.
2. Apply a critical legal conceptual understanding of existing medico-legal issues through the construction of detailed and coherent arguments, thereby contributing to their abilities to engage in critical legal and bioethical research, investigation, and analysis.
3. Situate health law and bioethical debates and analysis in cross-disciplinary, multi-cultural societal contexts and in recognition of legal and health policy, clinical practice, and ethical tensions.
4. Effectively communicate bioethical concepts and legal arguments and analysis to a variety of specialist and non-specialist audiences and to employ critical legal analysis and argumentation correctly while demonstrating the ability to manage time effectively.
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