Assessment of professionalism: A consolidation of current thinking

Abstract

Context: Professionalism has become a hot topic in medical education. Professionalism needs to be assessed if it is to be viewed as both positive and relevant. Objectives: The assessment of professionalism is an evolving field. This review aims to consolidate current thinking. Implications: Assessment of professionalism has progressed from an initial focus on the development and attainment of professional identity, through identifying areas of deficiency, to the attainment of a set of identifiable positive attributes and behaviours. It is now beginning to recognise the challenge of assessing a multi-dimensional construct, looking beyond the measurement of behaviour to embrace a diversity of approaches. Conclusions: Professionalism should be assessed longitudinally. It requires combinations of different approaches, assessing professionalism at individual, interpersonal and societal/institutional levels. Increasing the depth and the quality of reliability and validity of existing programmes in various contexts may be more appropriate than concentrating on developing new instruments. Increasing the number of tests and the number of relevant contexts will increase the reliability of the result. Similarly increasing the number of observers increases reliability. Feedback, encouraging reflection, can promote change in behaviour and identity formation.

A scoping review of medical professionalism research published in the Chinese language

“…The authors conclude that compared to western countries, professionalism assessment in China is still at an early stage of development and there is a pressing need to develop a unified and reliable assessment method [66]. Authors call upon domestic researchers and medical educators to improve the existing assessment system by studying and tailoring existing well-developed methods instead of developing a new one, a process both resource-intensive and unnecessary as shown by previous literature [10]. …”

Assessing medical professionalism: A systematic review of instruments and their measurement properties

“…In an effort to provide guidance for instrument usage, several published review articles have summarized and compared instruments assessing professionalism with respect to their content, type, and construction [9, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19]. These reviews have indicated that many instruments have not been fully evaluated for their measurement properties, which would then limit their usage [9, 13, 18].…”

Adaptación de la escala de Penn State College al idioma español para medición de profesionalismo en estudiantes de medicina

“…Given that professionalism is a complex and heterogeneous concept with an unclear definition, it is difficult to know how and when to introduce elements of professionalism in the medical school curriculum (13). Because instruments to measure professionalism for Spanish speaking students are not available, intervention strategies cannot be formally tracked.…”