The effect of online Quran teaching on physician's general and professional ethical conduct

Nowadays, the question of how the moral aspects of health can be put into the framework of patient-physician relationship has turned into a current debate in the area of medicine and patients’ rights. This study was conducted to examine the effect of virtual education through sending emails to physicians on their application of Islamic and Quranic codes of ethics. In this interventional study, 75 general practitioners and specialists in Kermanshah were selected through non-randomized simple sampling method. The means of data collection were physicians’ ethical conduct checklist and a questionnaire which was prepared by the researcher according to the ethical traits extracted from Quran and Hadith. Concepts extracted from Islamic resources were sent to the physicians email addresses 3 times a week. Data were analyzed through dependent t-test using SPSS software version15. The major findings of the study indicated the positive effects of online Quran teaching on enhancing the application of the ethical codes of conduct and stabilizing the professional codes of ethics. Although improving professional ethical conduct requires long-term training programs, the findings of this study indicated that religious education can be effective in using the general codes of ethics.