Public and Institutional Aspects of Professional Responsibility in Medicine and Psychiatry

Abstract

The article develops fresh perspectives on the normative practice model (npm) by extending its application to meso- and macrocontexts. Health care-related interactions, negotiations, and activities in these contexts have their own internal structure. One of the origins of the crisis in medical professionalism is the disregard for norms that shape health care conditions: efficiency standards, rules for policy making, quality measures, and principles of distributive justice. Disconnecting the professional from the moral purposes of health care was another source of the crisis. Doctors are not engineers; technocratic and scientistic views on professionalism detract from the vocation of the physician, which is to heal, to diminish suffering, and to console. The npm does not offer a blueprint—rather, it serves as a heuristic device that helps professionals and administrators to orient themselves both conceptually and normatively. Differences between contexts lead to different constellations of normative principles and to different descriptions of core responsibilities of stakeholders.

Faith in international agricultural development: Conservation Agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa

“…Second, the contextual side of practices refers to the environment-including both the natural and societal environment-of practices that influences the roles and responsibilities of practitioners (Glas 2017). Important here is the organisational environment; practices can be and often are embedded in organisations, the most familiar of which are public, for-profit, and non-profit or non-governmental organisations.…”