The United Kingdom Supreme court case of Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board resulted in the issuance of a guide on the professional standards and ethics for doctors in decision making and consent by the United Kingdom (UK) General Medical Council effective from 9 November 2020. The focal point of the paper is the Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board case report that led to the guide. The primary objective is to disseminate the guide with an overview of the principles of decision making and consent for doctors embedded in the guide that would be of benefit to all professional medical practitioners for the best practices. Some selected Malaysian cases on professional negligence related to the area will also be analysed to differentiate the test applied for advice and the test for diagnosis and treatment.

The undergraduate dental degree in Malaysia is regulated by the Malaysian Dental Council (MDC) (Standard of Undergraduate Competencies), Code of Professional Conduct of the Malaysian Dental Council, the Malaysian Qualification Framework 2.0 and the Malaysian Quality Agency (MQA) quality assurance documents. These primary documents emphasize the importance of professional ethics and law in dentistry as will be further detailed and discussed later. This study reflects on the need to integrate ethics, professionalism and law with sufficient coverage in terms of content and emphasis in the dental undergraduate curriculum. Literature and benchmarking practices are reviewed for a deeper reflection of the current needs in a professional dental ethics and law education course. The present study is primarily focused on regulatory requirements, legal cases and comparative literature to serve as a reference on how professional ethics and law courses may be conducted. As an incidental measure, a reflection as to how the course of study of professional ethics is delivered in a local university is considered in a selected local university’s undergraduate dental curriculum. The findings indicate that ethics professionalism and dental law is not given sufficient emphasis as it is included as one of the minor components within another overcrowded subject and the coverage of what is taught is limited in context. This paper is an invitation to all dental schools to review and reflect whether, given the emphasis on professional ethics, legal and regulatory compliance in the regulatory documents, it is adequately reflected in their dental curriculum. In this regard, some benchmarking references are done to suggest what such a course should cover, for consideration of the dental schools.
Ethics, Dental