PRACTICAL CLASSES AS A TOOL IN THE TEACHING OF DEONTOLOGY IN THE AREA OF HEALTH SCIENCES

Deontology is an important subject in the formation of the graduate in Health Sciences, as it not only provides students with a better understanding of the meaning and implications of their future professional activity but also provides them with tools from which to analyze in a meaningful and critical way their own approaches and professional activity and to accordingly, seek solutions to the problems faced in such activity. Thus this subject, largely oriented to professional activity, helps develop skills and abilities that are not obtained in other disciplines and contributes to the critical spirit of the students and promotes the rules that govern the professional activity, according to the freedom and responsibility with which health sciences graduates have to act.

For all this, it is essential that students develop the knowledge acquired in the lectures through practical classes, which will proceed to delve into different aspects through the resolution of practical cases and ethical dilemmas for them to learn to act according to ethical and legal criteria in the various fields of action.

In practical classes of deontology, students must work with the basic values and principles taught in theory, to be able to form the appropriate decision-making in complex and/or ambiguous situations that are not explicitly described in lectures as they are very concrete and specific activities for a particular case or new activities that have not yet been sufficiently developed.

We propose to raise practical cases, where students will work in small groups, which will have to make a report to the whole group, based on four key points, to find the solution to the problems:
- Understanding the situation- the group must discover the key elements and relevant facts involved in the problem and its potential damage.
- Isolate the main dilemma- they must have a complete understanding of the problem to achieve a quality decision.
- Analyze ethically alternatives- The analysis is done by answering a series of questions that have a sustained number of common principles at its core.
- Make a decision and plan an execution (implementation)- an ethically defensible decision has to be made, which helps the students to understand how specific principles apply to the situation. The purpose is to provide reasonable support for the decision taken.

Decision making on ethical issues is inevitable and no external instrument can replace it, so one of the elements that students must exercise is precisely in the creation of a professional culture for decision-making.