Objectives

Health care professionals and others professionally interested in medical ethics find themselves increasingly confronted with moral questions and dilemmas. Such complex issues challenge the people who have to deal with them every day. They require careful study and well-considered judgment, as well as rigorous questioning and thorough debate. Nowadays ethics education has become part of the curriculum of most European Health Care training programmes. However, in Europe a concentrated grouping of such initiatives was lacking. With several European universities and institutes the Master of Bioethics wants to offer a post-academic, complementary education in health care ethics with an effective and condensed learning trajectory according to specific objectives.

At the level of knowledge, the Master of Bioethics programme intends to introduce the participants to the most important traditions in health care ethics, with major contemporary movements, as well as to conceptual, methodological and practical issues in different areas of health care ethics. The programme wants to pay specifically attention to European traditions in philosophy, theology and ethics.

At the level of skills, the Master of Bioethics intends to educate the students the competences needed to conduct research in bioethics independently. The students are encouraged to participate in the scientific debate and literature in the domain of bioethics. The master programme also intends to support students in critically analyzing the scientific literature, writing scientific articles and submitting papers and articles to conferences and journals.

The Master of Bioethics also prepares the students to integrate their theoretical knowledge with requisite attitudes and skills, in order to be able to apply these in a predominantly clinical context. The students should be prepared to participate in clinical ethics committees or in research ethics committees. The students should be able to deal autonomously with complex ethical problems in the field of medicine and/or research and to analyze them and reflect on them.

At the level of attitudes, the Master of Bioethics stimulates the students to develop a critical attitude towards ethical problems and the scientific bioethical literature, to develop openness towards different positions and to work in a multidisciplinary way. The Master programme also intends to increase moral sensibility and to develop a continuous awareness for ethical issues in clinical practice.