ABSTRACT
Arguments for the importance of a nuanced ethics education have been advanced in terms of the nature of the clinician-patient relationship outside the hospital setting as well as the sheer volume of patient-clinician contacts in primary healthcare. Ethics 'in' primary care, for example, might be attractive in the undergraduate medical education setting. Academic rationalism is one of the most recognisably traditional orientations in education. Social adaptation and social reconstruction collectively are an orientation that derives its aims and content from an analysis of the society that education is designed to serve. This chapter considers some specific medical contexts for teaching and learning ethics in primary healthcare. Medical students and immediately qualified doctors in the global West are pluripotential. Ethics education may be seen as instrumental to a variety of purposes, such as leadership, management, and teaching and commissioning. Leadership training may have an overt orientation towards social reconstruction (recognising the need for and leading change).
