Professional Silos or Professional Integration? Exploring the role of the basic science disciplines in healthcare professionals’ professional identities

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Professional identity (PI) is an important topic within modern healthcare curricula; presently, explorations of this topic focus on the impact of clinical experience. We sought to explore the impact of science education on PI from healthcare practitioners' perspectives using a qualitative approach. While this work is still in relative infancy, we found an unexpected outcome - that healthcare workers perceive their science knowledge as a central component of their PI. This work begins to unpack the complicated and previously poorly explored interplay between the sciences and clinical contexts have on practitioners' PI. Progression of this research area may help improve integration and explicit linking of healthcare sciences with both clinical education and PI development.