Medical Professionalism

Resources: Relevance to today/tomorrow 

Another look at the Kings Fund Report - pages 47 to 50 - 'Taking modern professionalism forward'. Part of this section says:

"Here we propose five approaches to developing a new sense of professionalism based upon a realignment of interests between patients, doctors and society. In practice, a number of innovative initiatives, of the kind we describe, are already underway. But there is still a long way to go before they become a routine part of medical professional work. We propose the following approaches:

• new partnerships
• new processes
• new expectations
• stronger institutional leadership
• new relationships between patient, doctor and state."

Please see this provocative paper "Transforming medical professionalism to fit changing health needs" in BMC Medicine. The abstract is copied below:

Background

The professional organization of medical work no longer reflects the changing health needs caused by the growing number of complex and chronically ill patients. Key stakeholders enforce coordination and remove power from the medical professions in order allow for these changes. However, it may also be necessary to initiate basic changes to way in which the medical professionals work in order to adapt to the changing health needs.

Discussion

Medical leaders, supported by health policy makers, can consciously activate the self-regulatory capacity of medical professionalism in order to transform the medical profession and the related professional processes of care so that it can adapt to the changing health needs. In doing so, they would open up additional routes to the improvement of the health services system and to health improvement. This involves three consecutive steps: (1) defining and categorizing the health needs of the population; (2) reorganizing the specialty domains around the needs of population groups; (3) reorganizing the specialty domains by eliminating work that could be done by less educated personnel or by the patients themselves. We suggest seven strategies that are required in order to achieve this transformation.

Summary

Changing medical professionalism to fit the changing health needs will not be easy. It will need strong leadership. But, if the medical world does not embark on this endeavour, good doctoring will become merely a bureaucratic and/or marketing exercise that obscures the ultimate goal of medicine which is to optimize the health of both individuals and the entire population.

Updating our contract

We met a paper by Sylvia and Richard Cruess in Topic 1 Professionalism must be taught. One of the points they make is that the contract between the medical profession and society needs constant updating and negotiation.

Here are two videos on social media:

 by Dr Ferris Timimi (His slide show of the same topic is here)

And a more lighthearted look:  

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From the ACOG Junior Fellows.