Developing and evaluating professionalism

Professional behaviour, being one of the domains of professionalism, is an area of medical education that has long been of concern to medical educators. At Hacettepe University, our main goal is to have students become conscious of professional identity, values, responsibilities and the physician-patient relationship. We welcome our new students with an opening ceremony on their first day and two months later, the students start the course called "Health-Illness Concepts and Medical Professional Identity". Students are expected to discuss the subjects given to them as scenarios or arguments. The aim of our study is to determine whether the course leads to a positive change in students' attitudes, indicating the attainment of those attributes that reflect professionalism. On the first and the last days of the course, a questionnaire was delivered to the students. Any positive change in preferences between the two questionnaires is identified as an achievement of that attribute. As a result we found that in all of the seven attributes there were positive changes in the students' attitudes. Positive changes varied from 48% to 84% and all were statistically significant. Using more interactive techniques helped the students to make larger percentage changes in their awareness of these professional attributes.