HMS Finds Lack in Military Ethics Training

Medical school students receive little instruction about military medical ethics and are often unaware of a physician’s ethical duties under the Geneva Conventions, according to a new study by Harvard Medical School faculty.

Of the 1,700 students surveyed around the country, 94 percent said that they had received less than one hour of military medical ethics instruction during medical school. The study also found that 33.8 percent of students did not know that the Geneva Conventions require that doctors “treat the sickest first, regardless of nationality.”

In addition to four multiple-choice questions, the students polled were also asked to name who they supported in the 2004 presidential election. The researchers found that supporters of President Bush were one-third less likely than supporters of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to know that interrogation methods depriving prisoners of sleep, food, or water or employing threats are forbidden under the Geneva Conventions. Those who voted for Bush were also less likely to know when they would be required to disobey an unethical order from a superior.

Legislative Director of the Harvard College Democrats Jarret A. Zafran ’09 said this difference could be attributed to ideology. Harvard Republican Club President Jeffrey Kwong ’08, meanwhile, would not comment on whether Republican-leaning medical students were less likely to say that some harsh interrogation methods were unethical, but said the HRC opposes torture and also supports the Geneva Conventions.

The authors of the study developed it after learning about the existence of a process for a doctor draft, according to head researcher J. Wesley Boyd. “If we were to get drafted we could become military physicians in two or three weeks, so we thought maybe we ought to see if [students] know anything about military ethics in general,” said Boyd, a clinical instructor in psychiatry at the Medical School.

Known as the Health Care Personnel Delivery System, the process was authorized by Congress in 1987 to allow the U.S. to draft civilian physicians should there be a shortage of military doctors. Only 3.5 percent of the students surveyed in the study said they knew about the draft.

Boyd said that his team sent over 5,000 e-mail surveys to students at eight different medical schools around the country and received 1,700 responses. He said he would not release the names of the institutions surveyed because the researchers were not in “formal cooperation” with the schools, but said that one was in Massachusetts.

Boyd suggested that a couple of lectures devoted to the possibility of ending up in military service, the mandates of the Geneva Conventions, and supplements to the Geneva Conventions laid out by the World Medical Association would provide medical students with a greater awareness of military ethics.

“I feel like even a couple of hours, maybe even over lunchtime talks, would represent a great improvement,” said Boyd, who is also an attending psychiatrist at Cambridge Health Alliance.