Teaching and assessing ethics and law in the dental curriculum

The General Dental Council's recommendations on dental education places a new emphasis on the importance of ethics and law in the dental curriculum, stating that students should have an awareness of moral and ethical responsibilities involved in the provision of care to individual patients and to populations.(1) The duties of care to protect a patient's life and health at all times, to respect their autonomy to make informed choices about what happens ta them, and to do this fairly and without prejudice, are widely accepted as the fundamental ethical principles governing all health care. The specifics of these duties of care are detailed in Maintaining Standards: guidance to dentists on professional and personal conduct, published by the GDC.(2)