LAHORE: Punjab Higher Education Commission (PHEC) Chairman Prof Dr Muhammad Nizamuddin says that the medical fraternity is becoming more dependent on technology and more impersonal.

“Fundamental values of medicine insist that a doctor’s obligation is to keep the patient’s interest above everything else,” he said in his keynote speech at the inaugural session of an international conference on medical ethics at the University of Health Sciences (UHS) on Monday.

The two-day conference “Ethics in challenging Times” is being organised in collaboration with the Centre of Biomedical Ethics and Culture (CBEC), Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation, Karachi.

“The medical profession is at a crossroads and facing many ethical challenges in its practice. It is a fact that cannot be ignored that there is increasing dissatisfaction on the part of the patients who are expecting more and more from the doctors. Ethics is the basic requirement in every profession but medicine should take a lead in it,” said Prof Nizamuddin.

UHS Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Junaid Sarfraz Khan said important issues of autonomy, confidentiality, justice, beneficence and non-maleficence are the key factors that should guide doctors in their daily decision-making process.

Conference coordinator and UHS Allied Health Sciences Department head Dr Saqib Mahmood said the basic objective of the moot was to deliberate upon the current status of ethics in medical practice in Pakistan and to create awareness about the principles of clinical and biomedical research ethics.

Later, Prof Alastair Campbell of the National University of Singapore gave a presentation on “Bioethics in Asia: the Challenges”; Prof Farhat Moazam, chairperson of CBEC, SIUT, Karachi, spoke on “Bioethics: Indigenising a Foreign Construct”; Prof Aamir Jafarey of the CBEC Karachi on “Bioethics comes to Pakistan-Focus on Capacity Enhancement; Dr Faisal Rasheed Khan from Isra University on “Turning Training into Practice”; Prof Dr Mowadat H. Rana gave a presentation on “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty: Aesthetics and Medical Ethics”; and, UHS VC Prof Junaid Sarfraz Khan spoke on “Using caricature/videos and images to raise medical professionalism and ethics awareness”.

Published in Dawn, March 21st, 2017