Importance of Professionalism for the Practice of Quality Health Care: Opinion Essay

“Is professionalism necessary for the practice of quality health care?”

Have you ever wandered what makes a healthcare successful? It could be due to good time management, enough staff on duty with the right skill, excellent safety management for patients etc. This question could be answered many different ways, except all the answers would eventually lead to one point. Professionalism is a conduct, attitude, and behaviour of someone in a workplace. The way professionalism impacts a health care is always positive, it leads to workplace success, an excellent professional reputation, and a high level of work ethics. This essay will demonstrate how professionalism is manged and the nature of professionalism and the impact it has on the health care, it will look into the key principles with reference to evidence-based practice and how much of an impact it has in regards to quality health care, illustrate the importance of interprofessional working and the benefit of interprofessional collaboration in healthcare.

To have a good understanding of the characteristic of professionalism in health care, initially, it is essential to comprehend the nature of profession. A sociologist known by the name of Eliot Freidson defined a profession as a specific type of occupation, with a unique characteristic at the same time as competing for social, economic, and political rewards (Swick,2000). Many different professions fall under the category of health careers such as nursing, pharmacy, doctors, optician etc. However, they must all provide good quality health care to remain professional. “professionalism may not be sufficient to drive the profound and far-reaching changes needed in the health care system, but without it, the health care enterprise is lost”(Lesser, Lucey, Egener, Braddock, linas, Levinson,2010). This emphasizes the significance of professionalism as this statement suggest that health care enterprise will be “lost” without it. This further highlight that health care enterprises would not be in the situation that they are in without professional behaviour and attitudes. Health care professionalism is an ideal constructed around social, ethical, scientific, and moral duties and suggestion. For this perspective, professionalism is determined by various point of interest, for instance patient-doctor/practitioner relationship, and the interaction between the practitioner and hospital (Andruszkow, Hildebrand, Pfeifer, Horst, Pape, 2014) prominent in light of the fact that it improves the quality of health care

• Present a detailed discussion of the nature of professionalism in the health care sector.
• Collects information from a wide variety of authoritative sources to identify professional standards and the major attributes of professionalism.
• Identifies and synthesizes a comprehensive set of principles and concepts underlying theoretical frameworks and approaches regarding ethics and professional standards. Makes a critical summary of the underpinning theory.

Reference

1. Swick, H.M., (2000). Toward a normative definition of medical professionalism. Academic medicine, 75(6), pp.612-616.
2. Lesser, C.S., Lucey, C.R., Egener, B., Braddock, C.H., Linas, S.L. and Levinson, W., (2010). A behavioral and systems view of professionalism. Jama, 304(24), pp.2732-2737.
3. Andruszkow H., Hildebrand F., Pfeifer R., Horst K., Pape HC. (2014) Professionalism in Health Care Patient Safety in Surgery[online] Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4369-7_10 (assessed 22/10/2020)
4. https://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/fulltext/2000/06000/toward_a_normative_definition_of_medical.10.aspx
5. https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=WX4vL5HusYMC&oi=fnd&pg=PR8&dq=nature+of+professionalism+in+the+health+care+sector&ots=eJaZjGFP5p&sig=otjzcu_xekfgSMF7ExCKQdp2deI#v=onepage&q=nature%20of%20professionalism%20in%20the%20health%20care%20sector&f=false
6. https://www.cram.com/essay/The-Importance-Of-Evidence-Based-Practices/FKJRJ7LG6EEX