.jpg)
Trevor Wan and Victor Li
Published online: January 2026
In Hong Kong, an internship, also called housemanship, is a 12-month period during which fresh medical graduates rotate across four departments in public hospitals and acquire hands-on clinical experience through daily care of patients. Yet this phase is fraught with inherent tension: interns, with relatively limited clinical experience, are held to the same, exacting standards of competence that bind fully licensed practitioners. High-profile intern mishaps over the years have brought this tension into sharp relief, including cases of mispositioned nasogastric feeding tubes being missed on X-rays that led to catastrophic feeding into the respiratory tract and subsequent aspiration pneumonia, errors in pre-transfusion blood cross-matching procedures, and delays in diagnosing acute myocardial infarction. These cases, which have elicited considerable public scrutiny and comment, most recently from the city’s health minister, reveal deeper systemic concerns regarding accountability, patient safety, and professional responsibility.
In examining these issues, we find that a Confucian virtue ethics approach is......
Please click here to read full text on BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics Forum.
No comments:
Post a Comment