Exploring ethical and legal education in the off-label drugs use during residency training

The off-label drugs use is a common practice in clinical medicine, which has both medical ethical legitimacy and ethical confusion, as well as hidden medical and legal risks. Appropriate the off-label drugs use can alleviate patients’ pain, otherwise endangering their safety. The new Physician Law establishes legal norms for the off-label drugs use. The medical ethics and health law knowledge learned by resident physicians during their undergraduate studies all are basic knowledge and general principles, while the legal and ethical knowledge about the off-label drugs use is insufficient. A questionnaire survey on the ethical and legal issues of the off-label drugs use for resident physicians found that resident physicians urgently need to learn ethical and legal knowledge, as well as receive clinical application teaching and training in the aspect of the off-label drugs use. Therefore, in the standardized training of resident physicians, ethical and legal education on the off-label drugs use has been added. The core of this training is to conduct theoretical lectures focusing on the six ethical and legal principles of the off-label drugs use, as well as providing practical teaching drawing on the “clinic-style legal teaching” model. This paper explored a method for conducting ethical and legal education on the off-label drugs use in the future during the resident training stage.