Skillful Moral Leadership:

Teaching Moral Courage & Rights-Based Leadership in Medicine: A Cross-Disciplinary Exploration

Clinical medicine's complexities and demands often surpass the scope of formal ethics and leadership training that medical schools and residency programs provide. The discrepancy between medical education and the realities of clinical work may contribute to ethical erosion among learners, namely, medical students and residents. Unlike traditional approaches to teaching professional ethics and leadership in medicine, rights-based (aspirational) pedagogies approach trainees as autonomous moral agents, whose work has moral value to themselves and others, who live with the ethical consequences of their professional choices, and whose work shapes their individual moral character. By incorporating teaching strategies that intentionally build learners' rights-based leadership through the development of moral courage, medical educators may counter important aspects of ethical erosion while promoting learner preparedness, outcomes, and well-being. Military teaching approaches offer a valuable example to medical educators seeking to create structured curricula that foster moral courage to promote rights-based leadership, given the high level of moral and managerial complexity present in both medicine and the military. Through a comparative analysis of professional ethics in the medical and military disciplines, this Observation article explores the validity of applying precedents from military ethics and leadership education to medical training. Through arguments rooted in moral philosophy, military history, and military organizational research, we explore the expansion of rights-based teaching methods within the predominantly traditional and rules-based norms of medical education. In relating these findings to real-life clinical scenarios, we offer six specific, rights-based modifications to medical ethics curricula that have potential to promote morally courageous leadership and counteract the ethical erosion medical students and residents face.

Deconstructing identity: Professional relationships for sustaining morally habitable workplaces

Our professional responsibility as nurses is to enact social justice by changing oppressive structures. However, this may be difficult with competing perspectives in healthcare environments. Deconstructing our identity is foundational if we are to understand how to develop professional relationships with peers to move forward as a collective to enact social justice. A paradigm shift, from one world view to multiplicity, will help us develop insight into our own identities and professional relationships to sustain morally habitable workplaces.