BACKGROUND The Brazilian undergraduate medical course is six years long. As in other countries, a medical residency is not obligatory to practice as a doctor. In this context, this paper aims to clarify what and when competencies in communication and professionalism should be addressed, shedding light on the role of university, residency and post-residency programmes. METHODS Brazilian family...

BACKGROUND Transformation of medical students to become medical professionals is a core competency required for physicians in the 21st century. Role modeling was traditionally the key method of transmitting this skill. Medical schools are developing medical curricula which are explicit in ensuring students develop the professional competency and understand the values and attributes of this role...

BACKGROUND Acquiring the values of medical professionalism has become a critical issue in medical education. The purpose of this study was to identify lapses in professionalism witnessed by medical students during their four year MD curriculum, and to categorize, from the students' perspective, who was responsible and the settings in which these occurred. METHODS An electronic survey, develop...

Doctors must increasingly be aware of what they should be, as well as what they should know. Professionalism, including a value system that supports the compassionate care of patients, is a means of encapsulating and prioritising these competing responsibilities. Accordingly, in this article, we assume that professionalism is an essential aspect of medical practice that needs to be taught to th...

OBJECTIVE To develop and validate a scale for the assessment of professionalism in medical students based on students' perceptions of and attitudes towards professionalism in medicine. METHODS This was a mixed methods study with undergraduate medical students. Two focus groups were carried out with 12 students, followed by a transcript analysis (grounded theory method with open coding). Then,...

In this article, the author challenges the widely held assumption that humanism and professionalism are necessarily complementary themes in medical education. He argues that humanism and professionalism are two very different value systems with different rationales, different goals, and different agendas. Whereas humanism is a universal, egalitarian ideology, professionalism represents the paro...

INTRODUCTION Medical professionalism is a core competency for emergency medicine (EM) trainees; but defining professionalism remains challenging, leading to difficulties creating objectives and performing assessment. Because professionalism is dynamic, culture-specific, and often taught by modeling, an exploration of trainees' perceptions can highlight their educational baseline and elucidate t...

OBJECTIVE To discover what Australian medical students think about the way professionalism is taught in their medical curriculum. DESIGN, PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING Qualitative study including five focus groups between 2 June 2010 and 30 September 2010, comprised of medical students from both undergraduate and postgraduate entry programs who were in the last 1-2 years of the medical program and...