Featured publication

Understanding Doctors

Authors:
Ros Levenson,
Steve Dewar,
Susan Shepherd
Date: May 2008
Price: £10


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Ensuring that doctors practise professionally is the best way of assuring the safety and quality of the health care upon which so many of us rely.

The Royal College of Physicians defines medical professionalism as ‘a set of values, behaviours, and relationships that underpins the trust the public has in doctors’. It regards ‘integrity, compassion, altruism, continuous improvement, excellence and working in partnership with members of the wider healthcare team’ as being vital in underpinning that professionalism.

But doctors do not become professionals by virtue of starting their first job as a qualified practitioner. The process of becoming a professional begins much earlier and the task of sustaining professional behaviour may continue for a lifetime.

To become a professional means grappling with a wide range of ethical and political issues about how to behave in a society of rapidly changing values, and how to understand the role of the doctor in an increasingly complex health care system.

The King’s Fund and the Royal College of Physicians have teamed up with the General Medical Council, NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement and the Centre for Excellence in Developing Professionalism to engage medical students in these issues.

Together we are running a series of lively discussions and debates - titled ‘Becoming a doctor: journey or destination?’ - aimed at giving medical students up and down the country a chance to explore these difficult questions and hear the views of those that lead, regulate and occasionally challenge the medical profession.

The medical schools chosen for the first debates are St George’s (University of London), Brighton & Sussex, Newcastle and Oxford.

The events are by invitation only. However we’ve set up a 'Becoming a doctor' facebook group - open to all - as a way of continuing the debate beyond these four events, as well as acting as a portal to a range of resources on medical professionalism.

• How to join the facebook group.

These events for medical students follow a series of 10 road shows for doctors that the King’s Fund and the Royal College of Physicians ran in 2006/07. These earlier road shows aimed to raise awareness of the key messages from two important reports on medical professionalism On Being a Doctor: Redefining medical professionalism for better patient care (King’s Fund, 2004) and Doctors in society: Medical professionalism in a changing world (RCP, 2005). A report on the themes from the 2006/07 road shows was published in May 2008, Understanding Doctors: Harnessing professionalism.

For more information on our work on medical professionalism, contact Clare Bawden.

 

• Resources on medical professionalism