Now is the perfect time for engineering to join the caring professions

Like members of the medical profession currently tackling the Covid-19 pandemic, engineers should be trained to think about the wider impact on people and society of the decisions they make.

We’ve all been struck by the horror and sadness of doctors, nurses and other medical care workers around the world having to make challenging ethical decisions related to caring for computer engineering careers patients. We empathise with their plight and wonder what we would do in their shoes, but try to take confidence in the hope that their years of training and the scenarios they have encountered in their academic courses or residencies will help them.

Indeed, over the past decades, the field of medical humanities - which, according to a paper published in 2002 in the academic journal of the same name, aims to “[understand] the human body not only in medicine’s conventional biological terms but also in sociological, philosophical, psychological and cultural terms” - has been incorporated more and more into medical training.

Many universities now offer standalone degrees in the subject. While humanities training in higher education may not make these difficult choices any easier, it goes some way to preparing medical professionals to meet the challenges they encounter on the job.