Acıbadem University, School of Medicine, ‘Clinical Medicine and Professional Skills’ Program: Qualitative Evaluation of Medical Professionalism Outcomes

Purpose: Changing healthcare needs of the modern society in epidemiological transition created the necessity to embed the professionalism context into medical education.Undergraduate medical education programs now adopt new approaches including different educational strategies, teaching and learning techniques as well as redefined competence areas for medical professionalism; for example, communicational skills, attitudinal and ethical issues, teamwork, evidence based practice, early exposure to clinical and ethical reasoning, preparation for practice can be mentioned. These new trends in medical education are believed to benefit good medical practice and a person centered approach of future medical professionals, thus increasing quality of care. At Acıbadem University School of Medicine the medical education curriculum is structured according to the new perspectives of medical education principles and a new pre-clinical professionality program which is called Clinical Medicine and Professional Skills (CMPS). The CMPS program is providing the students a broad understanding of professionalism, ethics, communication and clinical skills, and some basic procedural skills before attending the clerkship years. At the end of the 2011-2012 academic year, the first three years of the CMPS program were completed and the students passed to the second phase (clerkship period). This study aims to describe the perception of students and teachers at ACUMS about professionalism outcomes of the program. Patients and Methods: This is a qualitative study using phenomenological research strategy with a face-to-face interview data collection method. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that early exposure to professionalism domains in under graduate medical education creates a high level of professional self-awareness going along with corresponding expectations from the forth following medical education infrastructure in students. They have high levels of expectations from the medical curriculum in the clinical phase, the training sites and infrastructure. They also expect their clinical teachers to be “good professional role models and good teachers”.