Unveiling the Potential of Ethical Portfolios in Promoting Ethical Reasoning and Development: Experiences of Allied Health Students

The complex and evolving nature of ethical dilemmas in healthcare underscores the importance of teaching ethics to health college students. As teaching ethics became an integral part of education curricula, previous studies have mainly examined teaching ethics to medical students with a focus on teaching content. To address this gap, the study examined students’ ethical awareness and confidence levels before and after an ethics course for allied health students in a Saudi university. It also presented the development of an ethics portfolio as an assessment method. Through a virtue ethics perspective, the mixed-methods study employed content analysis of students’ ethics portfolios as well as descriptive analysis of survey responses. The Mann–Whitney U test was used to analyze the differences in the median scores of students’ assessment in the pre and post surveys. The study found that the majority of students chose fidelity as the ethical concept to improve. Most of the students chose the ethical concept based on their current behaviors and practices, or interactions with others. Attending professional courses was the most common evidence provided by students. The majority of students provided positive responses reflecting their ethical awareness and confidence in the pre survey. Students’ positive assessment of their awareness of ethics related to the profession and their ability to handle ethical dilemmas professionally decreased in the post survey. The study findings contribute to current literature on teaching ethics within health disciplines and extends it to discuss differences associated with allied health. The study introduces implications for students, academicians and healthcare providers, while highlighting the interplay between virtue ethics and Islamic ethics within the sociocultural context of Saudi Arabia.