Educating for Professionalism: What Counts? Who's Counting?

Abstract

“Character counts at Central High” is the message frequently exhibited on the curbside marquee outside our local secondary school. Its meaning, however, is left to interpretation by those who happen to drive by the electronic display. More than likely, the deceptively simple declaration implies that Central's curriculum and associated activities are value laden, that they somehow address the collective and somewhat ambiguous set of traits we label “character.” It is a hopeful message to those who consider forming the character of the country's future workforce and citizenry to be an important goal of schooling.

Challenges of educating for medical professionalism: who should step up to the line?

“…Who should assume educational responsibility to ensure that the virtues and values of medical professionalism are instilled in the course of medical education? The task might seem to fall naturally into the specific area of competence of medical ethics and, indeed, commentaries to the effect that medical ethics should take a leading role in imparting professionalism are not that hard to find 7,17,18 . The rise of professionalism, moreover, has coincided with a period of the re‐framing of professional curricular standards.…”

“…6 The second point of implicit – yet broad – agreement in recent statements on medical professionalism is that medical education needs to focus on the endowment of these professional attitudes among medical students. The third implicit assumption is that medical ethicists should take the lead in assuming this educational responsibility 7,17,18 . This paper critically examines the assumption that, in the educational division of labour, the task of supporting the development of the VMP should fall to medical ethicists.…”

Medical professionalism: teaching, learning, and assessment

“…However professionalism has been interpreted, its definition has been criticised for being "too abstract" (Wear & Kuczewski, 2004) and there have been calls for 'operationalising' the definition of professionalism (Hafferty, 2004). In line with such calls, the 'Outcome Project' (ACGME -American Council for Graduate Medical Education, 2007) has described professionalism as follows (Surdyk, 2003) The ABIM (American Board of Internal Medicine) definition of professionalism in their Physician Charter is similar to that of ACGME. The charter states that professionalism is a product of three fundamental principles: "primacy of patient welfare, patient autonomy, and social justice" (Sox, 2002).…”