Résumé de section

  • Note: if you want to gain a certificate for completing this course, you will have to create an account and log in as a student.

    Welcome to this Open Online Course on Medical Professionalism. It is available for self enrollment and self paced study. It was prepared by Professors Kichu Nair, Tim Wilkinson, Dick Heller and Drs Mohamed Haroon and Sergio Diez. The concepts are general, and we hope that you will be able to apply them in your own context.

    This course - originally developed as an Open Online Course (OOC) prepared by Peoples-uni, an educational initiative providing online Public Health capacity building for health professionals. The course provides basic introduction to key aspects of the issues of medical professionalism.


    We hope that after going through this resource, you will:

    • Understand the broad concepts of Medical Professionalism

    • Apply the knowledge gained to your own practice

    There are a range of definitions of Medical Professionalism, as will be discussed during the course, but one from the Australian Medical Association is: 

    "Medical professionalism embodies the values and skills that the profession and society expects of doctors. Through adherence to medical professionalism, doctors fulfil their duties to patients and the wider public."

    This course explores various aspects of Medical Professionalism. There are 5 main Topics - each one includes the competences, or learning outcomes, you can derive from exploring the issues, a number of resources to read (click on the blue hyperlinks to take you to the resource directly), and a suggestion for how to reflect on the issues.

    The course is built around the set of 10 professional responsibilities identified in 'Medical Professionalism in the new Millennium: A Physician Charter' by the American Board of Internal Medicine, and the Kings Fund report 'On being a doctor: Redefining medical professionalism for better patient care'., and the paper by Wilkinson, Wade and Knock A Blueprint to Assess Professionalism: Results of a Systematic Review.

    A number of other resources are drawn from various credible sources - each one of them is freely available online as free or open source resources.

     Ways to navigate the course: Click on the hyperlinks to take you to either a resource or to the reflection forum. You can post your reflection to the forum if you wish, and see the comments by others who have posted.

    Note: you will earn a Certificate if you access the resources and post a reflection in each Topic and pass the quiz at the end!

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    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.