Dr Ruthie Jeanneret1, Associate Professor Bernadette Richards1
1University Of Queensland, Australia
Biography:
Ruthie Jeanneret is a Lecturer at the University of Queensland Medical School, teaching and researching across the TC Beirne School of Law and School of Medicine. She undertook her doctoral studies at the Australian Centre for Health Law Research, QUT, studying regulation of voluntary assisted dying.
Bernadette Richards is currently Associate Professor of Ethics, Law and Professionalism at the University of Queensland Medical School. She has been a member of the NHMRC's Australian Health Ethics and Embryo Research Licensing Committees and Chaired the Mitochondrial Donation Expert Working Committee and was involved in drafting of the new law. Until recently Bernadette was President of the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law (AABHL), and has completed major projects on organ donation, consent to treatment and legal issues around innovative surgery. Her current research focus has been on innovation in healthcare and she has over 100 scholarly publications.
Abstract:
“Professionalism” is an essential aspect of good medical practice. It is also a ubiquitous but poorly defined term. While there is not a single accepted definition, professionalism is often used to refer to the active demonstration of professional values, like compassion and respect; ethics and morals, like integrity and trust; and attributes such as practising safely and effectively. Medical educators are responsible for training the doctors of the future and therefore have a key role to play in fostering professionalism in medical students.
The recent Medical Deans Report on Professionalism and professional identity of our future doctors (‘Report’) examined how professionalism is currently taught in medical schools across Australia and New Zealand. It reported on the results of surveys of 22 medical schools. An issue identified in the Report was that professionalism “can be a difficult concept to measure in ways other than identifying when something is ‘unprofessional’”. Consequently, students may believe they are demonstrating professionalism when they are simply not being "unprofessional".
Using a narrative literature review approach, this presentation outlines the ways in which medical educators currently “support” professionalism and “sanction” unprofessionalism in medical education. We use the lens of “responsive regulation” theory to guide our analysis of the literature. We conceive of medical educators as “regulators” because they seek to shape/steer the behaviour of medical students. In this research, we map the current approaches and identify where there are opportunities to consider more supportive rather than punitive approaches to fostering professionalism in medical students.