Faculty of responsibility: a key concept to cope with the ethical challenges medical students face

During their educational life, medical students encounter several challenges, the origins and causes of which vary. This paper explores and attempts to scrutinize two of these challenges, before eventually introducing the concept of responsibility. First, this paper describes the general characteristics of medical schools, medical students, and medical education. Second, two different ethical challenges that medical students confront are then delineated: the anxiety of continuously questioning ‘while being trained, do I cause patients to receive suboptimal health care?’ and occasionally feeling obligated, consequently, to breach the ethical boundaries to practice procedures on patients. Finally, the faculty of responsibility and its components are introduced and discussed as a model that can overcome these ethical challenges.