Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2026

Identifier

DOI: 10.1186/s12910-026-01487-3; PMCID: PMC13404295

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Pediatricians encounter ethically challenging cases in clinical practice throughout the world. In Ethiopia, ethically distressing pediatric cases are heightened by limited resources, lack of ethical frameworks to guide clinical care and withdrawal of supportive therapies, absence of child protection laws, and dearth of trained ethics consultants or institutional ethics committees providing clinical ethics consultation. Ethics training remains limited in undergraduate medical programs and absent in the resident curriculum at most institutions.

METHODS: A survey of Pediatric Residents and Pediatricians attending the Ethiopian Pediatric Society's 24th Annual Conference on March 2023 was conducted using a self-administered, clinical ethics needs assessment. Data were checked, cleaned, and entered into SPSS for analysis. The magnitude and the association between the different variables in relation to the outcome was measured and a 95% confidence interval (CI) and P values below 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

RESULTS: A total of 200 participants completed the survey (response rate 92% of conference attendees). Most of the study participants (85.8%) felt their clinical ethics trainings were inadequate to address the ethical challenges they faced frequently. Furthermore, 58% reported no established/formal method to address ethical concern in their respective Hospitals. Most common ethical dilemmas faced by participants included refusal of treatment by patient/family, disagreement between the healthcare team and patient/family, withholding/withdrawing life-prolonging measures (70%, 59.5%, 51.5%). Most participants (89.5%) wanted additional training. The common areas of interest for further training were withholding/withdrawing life-prolonging measures, refusal of treatment by patient/family and legal issues (45%, 46.5%, 40% respectively).

CONCLUSION: Ethiopian pediatricians and pediatric residents perceive that their training on clinical ethics is inadequate to address the ethical challenges they face in their daily practice. Creation of culturally relevant, pediatric-specific ethics educational programs for Ethiopian pediatricians is much needed.

Journal Title

BMC medical ethics [electronic resource]

Volume

27

Issue

1

MeSH Keywords

Humans; Ethiopia; Cross-Sectional Studies; Female; Pediatricians; Internship and Residency; Pediatrics; Surveys and Questionnaires; Male; Adult; Ethics, Clinical; Needs Assessment; Curriculum; Ethical Dilemmas

PubMed ID

42204526

Keywords

Clinical ethics education; Ethics training needs; Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs); Pediatric ethics

Comments

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Publisher's Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12910-026-01487-3

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