Introduction:

The teaching of bioethics to doctors in training should have a favorable impact on professional training.

Objective:

To identify the social representations of bioethics and ethics in first-semester medical students at a university in Bogotá.

Methods:

Qualitative study carried out with 40 participants, from the perspective of social representations with a processual and structural approach. A purposeful and convenience sampling was carried out, together with as a prototypical and graph theory analysis.

Results:

The social representations of bioethics in women focused on the word "ethics" with a distance index of 1.25 with respect to "health", "life", "biology" and "nature". In men, bioethics, with a focus on “morals”, obtained a distance index of 1.48 compared to “ethics”, “medicine”, “principles” and “values”. Ethics in women focused on "acts" and "performance", with a distance index of 0.99 regarding morals, society and good. Ethics in men focuses on acting, with a distance index of 0.95 for person, values and behavior.

Conclusions:

For the students, the social representations of bioethics are represented by means of medical ethics and ethics as an alternative that judges behaviors in individuals.

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