BACKGROUND: Professional teams are becoming more central to health care as evidence emerges that effective teamwork enhances the quality of patient care. Currently, health care professionals are poorly prepared by their education for their roles on the team. In parallel, there are increasing demands from consumers for health care professionals to serve the interests of society and patients through engaging in effective professional partnerships. Professionalism for health care providers is now being defined as a commitment to standards of excellence in the practice of the profession that are designed primarily to serve the interests of the patient and to be responsive to the health needs of society. Yet, there are multiple barriers impeding the development of professionalism beyond a uni-professional frame of reference. METHOD: Incorporating teamwork and professionalism into health care professional curricula at pre-registration level is proving to be challenging. These 2 areas of learning are brought together in this paper through a discussion of the role of interprofessional education in preparing all health care professional students for the workforce. CONCLUSION: Interprofessionalism is presented as a pre-registration curriculum framework that includes values shared by all health care professionals, which should be learned in order to more adequately prepare students for working in health care teams. It will be argued that interprofessional education provides appropriate methods by which to learn interprofessionalism, and that this will ultimately contribute to overcoming uni-professional exclusivity.

The case for educating health care students in professionalism as the core content of interprofessional education

PurposeHumanities form an integral part of undergraduate medical curricula at numerous medical schools all over the world, and medical journals publish a considerable quantity of articles in this field. The aim of this study was to determine the extent to which the literature on humanities i

Humanities in undergraduate medical education: a literature review.

Context Altruism, accountability, duty, integrity, respect for others and lifelong learning are qualities that have been identified as central to medical professionalism. However, we do not have a systematically developed understanding of what is needed to optimise medical students' personal and professional development (PPD). We need some level of agreement on how to teach and assess PPD, but traditional educational methods may not be strong determinants of students' or graduates' actual behaviour in clinical settings.



Aims  This paper considers the factors that demonstrably influence doctors' behaviour as a contribution to the development of a model for considering PPD within the broader context of medical practice. The model presented acknowledges that behaviour change comes about through a number of influences including education, feedback, rewards, penalties and participation. These elements can be plotted against the cognitive, affective and metacognitive processes that are intrinsic to learning.



Implications  A framework that promotes the consideration of all of these factors in PPD can provide guidance for schools undergoing curriculum reform and inform further research into one of the most important and challenging aspects of medical education.

Fostering students' personal and professional development in medicine: a new framework for PPD

This article examines the challenges that medical ethics education faces, given its aim of producing ethical doctors. Starting with an account of the ethical doctor, it then inquires into the key areas of medical students' ethical development, viz. knowledge, habituation and action, and describes more specific outcomes in these areas. Methods of teaching aimed at achieving specific outcomes are also discussed. The authors then turn to some difficulties that stand in the way of achieving the desired outcomes of medical ethics education, and survey what has been achieved so far, by considering a number of studies that have evaluated the efficacy of a range of medical ethics courses. The article concludes by suggesting that medical ethics education should give attention to the problems of evaluation of ethics curricula as the discipline comes of age.

How can we know that ethics education produces ethical doctors

PurposeTo compare the effects of two teaching methods (written case analyses and written case analyses with group discussion) on students’ recognition and assessment of common ethical dilemmas.MethodIn 1999–2000, all third-year students at the University of Washington School of Medicine on a

Finding effective strategies for teaching ethics: a comparison trial of two interventions.

Teaching ethics incorporates teaching of knowledge as well as skills and attitudes. Each of these requires different teaching and assessment methods. A core curriculum of ethics knowledge must address both the foundations of ethics and specific ethical topics. Ethical skills teaching focuses on the development of ethical awareness, moral reasoning, communication and collaborative action skills. Attitudes that are important for medical students to develop include honesty, integrity and trustworthiness, empathy and compassion, respect, and responsibility, as well as critical self-appraisal and commitment to lifelong education.

J S Whitehall

Papers

An ethics core curriculum for Australasian medical Schools.