About Project MELON



Doctors are so much more than walking books of facts; they are faced with ethically and legally challenging situations throughout their professional lives.

Medical ethics education helps make students aware of the situations that they will face in the clinical setting and suggests appropriate ways of approaching them. In the long term, it aids the development of moral and ethical reasoning that will allow student doctors to understand other people's views, helping them to become more empathetic and caring clinicians.

The importance of teaching of medical ethics and law (MEL) has only recently begun to gain recognition and relatively few educational resources are available. The proposed project seeks to address this gap by producing and evaluating innovative methods of teaching and learning. The aim is to establish a domain where MEL resources are shared and presented together through rich interactive media.

Project MELON aims to bring learning about Medical Ethics and Law up-to-date, with interactive MCQs, case videos, and discussions with other students and professors/lecturers from across the country.

Check out our latest article regarding how we developed the website, and the IME conference

THE IDEA
The learning objectives are taken from the Consensus Statement for Medical Ethics and Law (Stirrat, Johnston, Gillon et. al., 2010) that has been agreed upon by all 32 UK medical schools, coordinated by the IME (Institute of Medical Ethics).
THE DEVELOPMENT
The development started in October, where we met in our group to discuss the process by which we were to produce case videos. It was important for us to ensure that the content we were converting to the videos were accurate, and relevant to the curriculum.

We devised a method to achieve these aims. Firstly, we discussed and wrote down a scenario to make the video out of which would cover a number of areas of the IME topics. Next each of us would go away and research on the relevant legal, ethical and clinical implications of the case. We would come back and present to each other our findings shortly after. The peers we have recruited to help us with the project check through our content to ensure the accuracy of our writing. Next we write scripts on XtraNormal and make our scenarios come to life. Our final aim is to use XtraNormal to help us in the creation of videos using real-life actors.