Professionalism dilemmas experienced by health professions students: a cross-sectional study

ABSTRACT

Health professions students will invariably confront professionalism dilemmas. These early encounters significantly influence future professional attitudes and behaviours. Heretofore, studies concerning professionalism dilemmas experienced by health professions students across disciplines have been limited. To address this issue, we recruited 56 students with clinical experience from the National Taiwan University College of Medicine in the nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, medical technology, occupational therapy, and physiotherapy programs to participate in this research to compare health professions students’ understandings of professionalism and their experiences of professionalism dilemmas. We used group interviews to uncover students’ experiences of professionalism dilemmas. We identified the six most commonly reported professionalism dilemmas and found that interprofessional dilemmas were the dominant workplace professionalism dilemma for health professions students. We also identified significant disciplinary differences regarding dilemma types and frequencies. We employed the framework of dual identity development to better understand the role of professional and interprofessional identities in interprofessional dilemmas. The professionalism dilemmas that individual students encountered were shaped by disciplinary differences. Our findings suggest that the development of a sense of belonging to both their own profession and a broader interprofessional care team in health professions students can increase the effectiveness of interprofessional healthcare teams.

KEYWORDS:

• Professionalism dilemma
• interprofessional education
• professionalism
• qualitative method

Disclosure statement

Authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Ethics approval

This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee in National Taiwan University (201210076RIC)

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by research grants from Ministry of Science and Technology, R.O.C. The funding agency did not have any involvement in data collection, data analysis, and data interpretation.

Notes on contributors

Xin Wang

Xin Wang, PhD, is lecturer, School of Humanities, Jiangnan University, China. Dr. Wang’s research interests are oriented toward Higher Education and Professionalism.

Ming-Jung Ho

Ming-Jung Ho, MD, DPhil, is Professor, Department of Family Medicine; Associate Director, Center for Innovation and Leadership in Education (CENTILE) at Georgetown University Medical Center; Director of Education Research, MedStar Health.