Teaching and evaluating professionalism

Abstract

Although professionalism is one of the six Core Competencies in Graduate Medical Education, no "gold-standard" definition exists. Instead, different conceptual frameworks such as the Professional Identity Formation model (Boudreau et al., Acad, Med., 90:718-725, 2015) may be used during psychiatric residency education. Professionalism teaching content includes principles from these models as well as codes of ethics and legal requirements. These all need to be taught during psychiatric residency training both explicitly and implicitly through didactic curricula, clinical rotations, faculty role modeling, facilitated reflection, and the culture of the clinical learning environment (CLE), all of which are ideally aligned in their content and philosophy. Assessing professionalism and monitoring for lapses requires multimodal, ongoing feedback throughout all aspects of the training program; specific evaluation instruments are available. New frontiers in professionalism in psychiatric education include clarifying the developmental stages of professionalism, integrating culture and structural racism concerns into professionalism concepts, defining individual and group well-being responsibilities, using emerging clinical knowledge as learning grounds for professionalism, and demonstrating the impact of professionalism on improving patient care.