Professionalism and justice: ethical management guidelines for leaders of academic medical centers

Academic health centers (AHCs) exist for the sake of pursuit of excellence in their missions of patient care, teaching, and research. Survival should be a means to these goals and not an end unto itself. Because of the fiscal crisis in health care, leaders of AHCs face the possible diminution or even extinction of their centers. When preventing such a fate becomes the governing concern of these leaders, power concentrates in their hands and can be used to force cooperation among competing faculty members and groups for the sake of mutual survival. The ethical concepts of professionalism and justice can be used to create a vital, practical, alternative vision for the leadership of AHCs, in which their missions once again become central to their organizational culture. Creating a morally sustainable organizational culture of professionalism and justice should rely not on forced cooperation, but on voluntary cooperation of all stakeholders in the pursuit of a common goal-professional excellence in patient care, teaching, and research-with survival understood to be a means to this goal. To achieve this alternative vision, the authors propose five management guidelines. For example, all faculty should be made accountable not only for maximizing the good of the organization's professionalism but also for fostering financial viability.