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The accounting, medical, and legal professions share characteristics common to peer-reviewed professions. These professions also share challenges to professionalism. All three have been criticized for declining professionalism and for choosing commercial success over serving the public interest. Although the medical and legal professions have taken steps to promote a higher level of professional conduct by their members, the accounting profession has not launched initiatives to promote professionalism.

We discuss the initiatives instigated by the legal and medical professions using the five elements of professionalism framework (Hamilton, 2008a). Specifically, the framework highlights the importance of growth in personal conscience, demands compliance with the ethics of duty, inspires realization of aspirational goals, requires accountability of peer professionals, and emphasizes devotion to serving the public good. We recommend that members of the accounting profession use the five elements of professionalism framework to define, demonstrate, and assess professionalism. We conclude that promoting professionalism is a means for restoring professional identity for individual accountants as well as a means for fulfilling the accounting profession's contract with society.

Recent accreditation standards have changed for all US and Canadian medical schools and residency programs. Newly mandated knowledge, skills, behavior, and attitudes required of the learner to become a medical professional are permeated with professionalism and associated curricular themes. The art of medicine now emphasizes humanistic skills, ethical precepts, and principle-based values. To this end, this chapter calls for enhanced learner collaboration with educators, as well as a required longitudinal ethics curriculum and medical apprenticeship for all phases of medical education. These efforts can thereby result in greater moral reflection on professionalism and its successful assimilation into clinical practice.

Research on patient-centred professionalism in pharmacy is scarce compared with other health professions and in particular with pharmacists early in their careers. The purpose of this paper is to explore patient-centred professionalism in early career pharmacists and to describe reported behaviours.

This study explored patient-centred professional values and reported behaviours, taking a qualitative approach. In all, 53 early-career pharmacists, pharmacy tutors and pharmacy support staff, practising in community and hospital pharmacy in England took part; the concept of patient-centred professionalism was explored through focus group interviews and the critical incident technique was used to elicit real-life examples of professionalism in practice.

Triangulation of the data revealed three constructs of pharmacy patient-centred professionalism: being professionally competent, having ethical values and being a good communicator.

It is not known whether our participants’ perspectives reflect those of all pharmacists in the early stages of their careers. The data provide meaning for the concept of patient-centred professionalism. The work could be extended by developing a framework for wider application. Patient-centred professionalism in pharmacy needs further investigation from the patient perspective.

The findings have implications for pharmacy practice and education, particularly around increased interaction with patients.

The data contribute to a topic of importance to patients and in relation to UK health policy, which allocates more directly clinical roles to pharmacists, which go beyond the dispensing and supply of medicines.

The methods included a novel application of the critical incident technique, which generated empirical evidence on a previously under-researched topic.

Professional formation and evaluation in medical education lacks a reliable conceptual foundation. This shortcoming results from an insufficient appreciation of the history of medical ethics as the source of the concept of medicine as a profession. This chapter therefore explores the medical ethics of the Scottish physician-ethicist, John Gregory (1724–1773) and the English physician-ethicist, Thomas Percival (1740–1804), who between them invented the concept of medicine as a profession. Three components of this concept are identified: the commitment to scientific and clinical competence; the commitment to protect the patient's health-related interests; and passing on medicine as public trust, not merchant guild.

The purpose of this paper is to identify essential profession-related competencies, clinical knowledge and skills that medical students should develop in the early stages of their education for future professional practice.

A literature review and workshop resulted in a list of 46 crucial profession-related competencies. The first round of the modified Delphi survey (feedback questionnaire) involved experts who identified 26 items (via a Likert scale). The second round of the modified Delphi survey by faculty members highlighted ten items. Statistical analysis yielded four domains with items clustered as follows: interpersonal competencies (communication and collaboration), cognitive skills (problem solving, critical thinking and reflectivity), work-related skills (planning and time management) and professionalism (integrity, sense of responsibility, respect and empathy).

In conclusion, the results of this study provide insights and implications surrounding the competencies that are essential for assessment and facilitation in the early stages of a medical curriculum. The study also predicts the challenges of facilitating and assessing these competencies, as pointed out in recent literature. In general, outcomes of the study suggest that instead of categorizing the competencies, it is more meaningful to take a holistic and integrated approach in order to conceptualize, facilitate and assess these competencies in context of the complexities of real-life situations.

Ten items were identified as essential profession-related competencies that should be incorporated during the early stages of medical education. Six out of the ten items were agreed upon by all participants of the study: collaboration, communication, problem solving, integrity, responsibility and respect. This list aligns with the existing literature and graduate attributes internationally. Items related to planning and time management, critical thinking and reflectivity were regarded as specifically lacking and important areas of improvement for Arabic students. Divergence on items of empathy and medical ethics were observed among international and local panels, with the main concern, raised by medical faculty, being how to facilitate and assess these items. The competencies identified mandate reforms in the medical school curricula in an attempt to implement essential skills early in medical student’s career.

Cultural competence is a continual process that is ever expanding. Cultural competence is defined as proficient knowledge, skill development, and the application of that knowledge and skills to demonstrate cultural awareness, understanding, sensitivity, and humility. The objective of a health science-related cultural competence seminar is to provide meaningful and in-depth discourse expounding upon cultural attitudes, expressions, and experiences that shape and direct interactions between patient and health providers, allied health professionals, medical and allied health students, and faculty. The current health care infrastructure is “ill-equipped to provide effective health care to underserved populations in the United States” (Roberts et al., 2015, p. 1408). As such, the Post Baccalaureate Seminar was developed to mitigate the gap between what students know upon entering medical studies versus what they need to know to provide culturally competent care, particularly in medically underserved areas. The Post Baccalaureate Seminar is a 15-week course given during the fall semester of the one-year program in preparation for matriculation into medical school. Students have required readings, small group didactics, and group activities which address professionalism, medical ethics and experimentation, informed consent, cross-cultural communication, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Questioning (LGBTQ + ) concerns, and other aspects of cultural diversity. The required texts were selected as a pedagogical strategy to introduce the constructs of valuing diversity in a holistic manner. Upon completion of the seminar, premedical students indicate increased knowledge and skills for displaying cultural awareness and a greater level of sensitivity for their medical studies.

There is an increasing need for a better understanding of healthcare service marketing in social media. This paper aims to examine Under the framework of positioning theory, popular Instagram posts related to #plasticsurgery and their accounts were analyzed and the relationships between the posts’ attributes and the number of user comments and likes were examined.

A total of 272 posts associated with #plasticsurgery and their account profiles were analyzed.

Plastic surgery procedures were positioned on Instagram primarily by doctors and celebrity patients who were motivated by self-promotion. Doctors often omitted their medical credential information from their account profile and posts while featuring their vanity photos, emojis and consultation solicitations. They showed patients as the objects of surgery. On the other hand, patients positioned themselves as individuals with the agency by showing their faces rather than focusing on their body parts. Instagram users responded better to the doctors who positioned themselves more as business owners than medical professionals by soliciting consultations, offering discounts, displaying surgery photos and using emojis. In responding to patient posts, Instagram users liked under-dressed images more than fully clothed images and commented more on before-and-after photos than others.

In Instagram, doctors positioned themselves as self-interested providers of plastic surgery services, whereas patients positioned themselves as active consumers. Medical professionals’ social media activities should be more closely monitored to protect patient safety and the trust between patients and doctors.

This study shed light on how doctors and patients position themselves on social media and how they are received by social media users in the context of #plasticsurgery on Instagram.

This paper argues that the means by which the profession of medicine has to legitimise itself in the context of state‐provided health services is changing in a way that may be summarised in Weberian terms as a shift from substantive to formal rationality. The traditional model for such legitimations, evident in the UK over the last 50 years, relied heavily on professional interpretation of emergent patient needs, on professional pragmatism as a means of coping with resource limitations, on unsystematic empiricism and self‐critical reflections as sources of clinical knowledge, on professional self‐regulation, and on an empirical legal test of professional negligence. This seems to be in the process of being replaced by a neo‐bureaucratic model that relies on formalised assessments of patient need, explicit micro‐economic analysis, cumulative “scientific” evidence implemented through bureaucratic rules, increasingly external regulation, and possible shift to normative legal tests of professional negligence.

The purpose of this paper is to define, describe, and understand how to combat pseudoevidence‐based medicine (PBM).

Descriptive essay and review.

PBM can be defined as the practice of medicine based on falsehoods that are disseminated as true evidence, then adopted by unwitting and well‐intentioned practitioners of evidence‐based medicine (EBM). PBM borders on being not only unethical, but also criminal. It may well result not only in inappropriate quality standards and processes of care, but also in harms to patients. Is there a motive to commit the crime of PBM? Is there an opportunity to commit the crime? And is there evidence of the crime beyond reasonable doubt? This article answers those questions.

PBM should be opposed. This article recommends individual and corporate ways to oppose it, including heightened individual skepticism when evaluating evidence, and improved professionalism in relationships with patients and scientific endeavor.