Viewpoint: professionalism and humanism beyond the academic health center.

Medical professionalism and humanism have long been integral to the practice of medicine, and they will continue to shape practice in the 21st century. In recent years, many advances have been made in understanding the nature of medical professionalism and in efforts to teach and assess professional values and behaviors. As more and more teaching of both medical students and residents occurs in settings outside of academic medical centers, it is critically important that community physicians demonstrate behaviors that resonate professionalism and humanism.

Medical education for a changing world: moving beyond cultural competence into transnational competence.

Given rapidly changing global demographic dynamics and the unimpressive evidence regarding health outcomes attributable to cultural competence (CC) education, it is time to consider a fresh and unencumbered approach to preparing physicians to reduce health disparities and care for ethnoculturally and socially diverse patients, including migrants. Transnational competence (TC) education offers a comprehensive set of core skills derived from international relations, cross-cultural psychology, and intercultural communication that are also applicable for medical education. The authors discuss five limitations (conceptual, vision, action, alliance, and pedagogical) of current CC approaches and explain how an educational model based on TC would address each problem area.

Beyond the physician charter: reflections on medical professionalism.

The numerous challenges now facing the profession of medicine have led to an intense focus on professionalism by individual physicians and by their professional and academic organizations. In 2002, a distinguished group of leaders in internal medicine created the Physician Charter, which calls on physicians to reaffirm medical professionalism through commitment to three principles and 10 responsibilities. The Charter reflects a duty-based ethic that is chiefly concerned with physician competence.

Medical professionalism and the clinical anatomist.

Medical professionalism has become an important issue for medical education and practice. The core attributes of professionalism derive from the roles and responsibilities of professions and from the nature of medicine as a healing profession. In medical education, most of the focus on professionalism has been directed to the clinical arena, yet it is critically important that the attributes of professionalism be manifested in basic science courses--especially anatomy--as well as in clinical experiences, because the transformation from medical student to physician begins at the outset of medical school.