Medical students’ finger puppet film wins bioethics award

A team of our medical students, and their finger-puppets, have walked away with the top prize in a competition to produce a video about bioethics. The Box Office Bioethics competition, run by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, invited teams of students in three age categories (Year  11 and below, Year 12/13, and undergraduate) to submit short videos on a bioethical theme.

A Leicester team consisting of Sunjay Parmar, Dhawal Patel, Lewis Peake, Charlie Strachan and Jamie Thomson won in the undergraduate category for their film about ethics and public health which they originally produced for the second year module ‘Targeting Biochemical Knowledge to Medical Problems’.

Using a combination of knitted finger puppets, vox pop interviews and questions submitted via Twitter, the students created a ‘current affairs programme’ called Ethical Debates, tackling the public health issues of smoking interventions and vaccinations.

Some of the previous films produced for the module can be viewed on Dr Chris Willmott's BioethicsBytes YouTube channel.

The Box Office Bioethics judges, who included writer/broadcaster Dr Geoff Watts and Dr Rhona Knight from our Department of Medical and Social Care Education*, judged the entries on a 70/30 balance of content and production quality. The results were announced this week at the Council’s annual lecture.

*Conflict of interest declared.