What is it about?
Healthcare professionals regularly face decisions that cannot be resolved by medical knowledge alone. Questions about informed consent, treatment refusal, confidentiality, communicating difficult diagnoses, end-of-life care, cultural values, religion, and conflicts of interest all require ethical judgment alongside clinical expertise. In this study, we surveyed 559 physicians practicing in Jordan to explore their previous bioethics education, awareness of ethical principles, experiences with ethical challenges, confidence in dealing with ethical dilemmas, and priorities for further training. Although almost two-thirds of participants reported receiving at least three credit hours of ethics education during medical school, fewer than half reported awareness of the four core principles of biomedical ethics. At the same time, ethical challenges were common in clinical practice, particularly those involving traditions and values, law, religion, financial considerations, and conflicts of interest. Most importantly, physicians showed very strong interest in further bioethics education. Their highest-priority topics included treatment refusal, informed consent, communicating diagnosis and prognosis, and end-of-life care. The findings suggest that bioethics education should go beyond teaching terminology and principles. Physicians need practical, case-based training that helps them apply ethical reasoning to real clinical situations while taking cultural, legal, religious, and patient-centered considerations into account.
Featured Image
Photo by Philippe Oursel on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Ethical decision-making is part of everyday clinical practice, yet formal exposure to bioethics does not necessarily mean that clinicians feel prepared to manage complex ethical situations. Our findings reveal an important gap in Jordan. While 64.2% of participating physicians reported receiving at least three credit hours of ethics education, only 45.3% reported awareness of the four core bioethical principles. At the same time, 91.2% reported encountering ethical situations at least occasionally. The demand for further education was particularly striking: 91.1% expressed a need for specific ethics training, and 94.8% supported continuing bioethics education. These findings can help universities, residency programs, hospitals, professional organizations, and policymakers move toward a more practical model of bioethics education. Rather than focusing mainly on definitions, future programs should use clinical cases, discussion, simulation, role-playing, and reflective learning to develop ethical reasoning, communication, and decision-making. In Jordan and similar healthcare settings, such education must also be culturally grounded, recognizing the important influence of law, religion, family roles, social values, and professional responsibilities on clinical decisions.
Perspectives
As an ethicist, this research represents an area that is particularly important to me: the point where clinical knowledge, ethical reasoning, culture, communication, and patient-centered care meet. Clinical practice is rarely composed of purely scientific decisions. Healthcare professionals may know what can medically be done, yet still face the more difficult question of what should be done. Treatment refusal, informed consent, disclosure of difficult information, end-of-life decisions, conflicts between family wishes and patient preferences, and culturally sensitive decisions are examples where technical knowledge alone is insufficient. One finding that particularly stood out to me was the strong desire among physicians for further bioethics education. To me, this suggests that clinicians themselves recognize the need for practical tools that can help them navigate ethical uncertainty. I believe bioethics education should not be limited to memorizing autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. These principles provide an important foundation, but meaningful ethical competence develops when clinicians learn how to apply them to real people, real uncertainty, and real clinical situations. I hope this work contributes to developing bioethics education in Jordan that is practical, culturally grounded, and closely connected to the realities clinicians face at the bedside.
Dr. Hisham E. Hasan
Jordan University of Science and Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Assessment of bioethics education, ethical awareness, and training needs among physicians in Jordan, Global Bioethics, September 2026, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/11287462.2026.2728769.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
