Professional Identity and the Pursuit of Clinical Excellence

Date: Friday, 27 September 2024 | Time: 0900 – 1030 | Venue: Academia, The NAK Auditorium
Track Type: Keynote Lecture

Speaker: Prof Maria Athina (Tina) Martimianakis

Medical training is expected to socialise medical trainees into a vocation of caring—to help them develop a professional identity by learning how to “think, act and feel like a physician” (Merton, 1957). In this talk, I will introduce research that explicates how lived experience impacts what clinical learners come to associate with being a “good doctor”, and, therefore, what they come to embody as their professional identity. In the process, I will make a case for the benefit of integrating considerations of identity in educational quality improvement initiatives.

Recognising professional identity as the embodiment and performance of what a healthcare provider knows (expertise and skills) and the ethos in which they put this knowledge to work in the care of patients (the values, attitudes and behaviours that shape expertise into a specific practice).

I will argue that, to ensure our training programmes meet their stated objectives, we need to regularly assess educational activity on two levels—first, alignment between the expectations we set regarding what clinical learners must learn and the needs of all patients, and, second, surrounding clinical learners and faculty with a learning environment that supports and empowers them to apply what they learnt in the ethos we intend. This second focus requires an explicit evaluation of the culture of healthcare organisations.

By building into clinical training programmes an explicit focus on professional identity formation, we commit to evaluating how learners and faculty derive meaning about what constitutes good care through their day-to-day activities, while interacting with peers and other health professionals. It is through these complex interactions that health professionals consolidate and form their professional identities, and precisely why we cannot leave this important educational work to chance.

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