Developing a professionalism education framework at the institutional level with multidisciplinary consensus

Abstract

The varying opinions in defining professionalism have constrained teaching, learning and assessing professionalism in the medical curriculum. The literature shows that professionalism is sensitive to cultural, socio-economic factors with subtle differences between healthcare professions from various disciplines. Therefore, in conceptualising professionalism, there is a need to develop a professionalism framework at an institutional level for the basis of transparency and consistency in teaching, learning and assessment of professionalism. While institutions can adopt various methods to understand professionalism within their sociocultural context, they need to be aware that prioritisation of professionalism attributes may change over time due to changes in the social environment. Using the consensus meeting approach, we describe a defining framework that aligns with our institution's core values and the respective health professions programme educational outcome with the flexibility to include/exclude and define/redefine professionalism attributes. Flexibility is the key difference in this framework, which is different from other frameworks in the literature.