Enseñanza de ética a estudiantes peruanos en la carrera de medicina

Introduction: it is necessary to know if future professionals approach ethical issues in the curricular courses of their majors. Objective: to determine the self-report of the teaching of ethics to Peruvian medical students. Methods: cross-sectional descriptive study of secondary data. The information was collected through a virtual survey applied by the student co-authors, including students from all medical schools who had attended at least one academic cycle. They asked about the teaching of the ethics course, the ethics classes within other major courses, the topics they were taught and other socio-educational variables. Results: of the 707 participants, 56 % (395) were women, the median age was 22 years (interquartile range: 20-23 years). 65 % (459) had already taken the ethics course and 41 % (287) had received some kind of ethics within the courses, stating that they had served 85 %. The ethics topic most dealt with was ethics in the medical major (78 %), followed by ethics in the management of patients (76 %); the least treated were ethics for dealing with colleagues/colleagues (45 %) and the ethics in the courses work (51 %). Conclusion: although there are ethical issues that are frequently taught, others must be dealt with to a greater extent, since not doing so could generate ethical shortcomings due to ignorance by the students.