Professionalism: hard to measure but you know it when you see it I n 1992, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) convened a committee, which produced a white paper entitled Project Professionalism (1). chaired the committee. The paper emphasized values and ethics standards that would be required for board certification (2). It also pointed out that suboptimal professional behavior nega...

BACKGROUND Using movies has been accepted worldwide as a tool to help students learn medical professionalism. In the second year, a group of medical students conducted the "Cinemeducation" project to promote professionalism in the "Medical Ethics and Critical Thinking" course. METHOD Five movies with professionalism issues were screened with 20-30 students attending each session. After the sh...

INTRODUCTION We undertook a systematic review and narrative synthesis of the literature to identify how professionalism is defined in the medical education literature. METHODS Eligible studies included any articles published between 1999 and 2009 inclusive presenting viewpoints, opinions, or empirical research on defining medical professionalism. RESULTS We identified 195 papers on the topi...

The virtues that constitute medical professionalism have been aptly described in multiple position statements from professional organizations and individuals. These professional virtues depend on particular moral community traditions to undergird and sustain them. Attempts to ground these virtues in narratives intrinsic to medical practice--in the moral consensus of physicians or patients, in t...

Organized medicine's modern-day professionalism movement has reached the quarter-century mark. In this article, the authors travel to an earlier time to examine the concept of profession within the work of Abraham Flexner. Although Flexner used the concept sparingly, it is clear that much of his writing on reforming medical education is grounded in his views on physicians as professionals and m...

Klemenc-Ketis and Vrecko described the development and validation of a professionalism assessment scale for medical students in a recent issue of this journal.1 In the introduction to this article they state that ‘professionalism can be defined as a collection of attitudes, values, behaviours and relationships that act as the foundation of the health professional’s contract with society’. Subse...

OBJECTIVES Medical students and future physicians have chosen to pursue a profession that requires personal integrity, compassion and a constant awareness of the commitment made by them. Professionalism includes personal behaviors, knowledge, and competency. It includes the attitudes and values one holds and that run through the profession as a whole. Medical students learn professionalism duri...

BACKGROUND Professionalism has been an important tenet of medical education, yet defining it is a challenge. Perceptions of professional behavior may vary by individual, medical specialty, demographic group and institution. Understanding these differences should help institutions better clarify professionalism expectations and provide standards with which to evaluate resident behavior. METHOD...

INTRODUCTION Several studies have begun to explore medical students' understandings of professionalism generally and medical professionalism specifically. Despite espoused relationships between academic (AP) and medical professionalism (MP), previous research has not yet investigated students' conceptualisations of AP and MP and the relationships between the two. OBJECTIVES The current study,...

BACKGROUND Historically, knowledge and skill were of prime focus in medical education, where as professionalism was perceived as an attribute to be acquired during their MBBS studies. In the past decade, trends have changed and graduating medical students are expected to competently deliver care in a professional manner. The selection of applicants with professional attributes at the time of ad...