Over the past twenty-five years, professionalism has emerged as a substantive and sustained theme, the operationalization and measurement of which, has become a major concern for those involved in medical education. However, how to go about establishing the elements that constitute appropriate professionalism in order to assess them is difficult. Using a discourse analysis approach, the International Ottawa Conference Working Group on Professionalism (IOCPWG) studied some of the dominant notions of professionalism, and in particular the implications for its assessment. The results presented here reveal different ways of thinking about professionalism that can lead toward a multi-dimensional, multi-paradigmatic approach to assessing professionalism at different levels: individual, inter-personal, societal-institutional. Recommendations for research about professionalism assessment are also presented.
This is the first attempt to evaluate the use of comprehensive workplace assessment across the medical specialties in the UK. The methods are feasible to conduct and can make reliable distinctions between doctors' performances. With adaptation, they may be appropriate for assessing the workplace performance of other grades and specialties of doctor. This may be helpful in informing foundation assessment.
Professionalism can be assessed using a combination of observed clinical encounters, multisource feedback, patients' opinions, paper-based tests or simulations, measures of research and/or teaching activities, and scrutiny of self-assessments compared with assessments by others. Attributes that require more development in their measurement are reflectiveness, advocacy, lifelong learning, dealing with uncertainty, balancing availability to others with care for oneself, and seeking and responding to results of an audit.
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