Professionalism and Self-regulation

Vol. 304 No. 2, July 14, 2010			JAMA  • Online Features
		Editorial

The Role of Professionalism and Self-regulation in Detecting Impaired or Incompetent PhysiciansMatthew K. Wynia, MD, MPH  JAMA. 2010;304(2):210-212. doi:10.1001/jama.2010.945 The term professional is used in various ways. A professional might be a certified expert, someone devoted to the continuous study ("practice") of a complex craft, or someone granted the authority to carry out tasks and provide services that others are not allowed to perform. A professional might subsume personal interests to pursue a client's or the public's good. Or a professional, as compared with an amateur, might simply be someone paid for what he or she does. Given this range of meanings, questions about which occupations are professions, and what comprises professional behavior, are long-standing.1 Yet medicine is almost universally recognized as a "classic" profession.2 Moreover, regardless of how profession is defined, professionalism, like other "-isms" (consumerism, humanism, egotism, Catholicism, and the like), is a belief system. Specifically, professionalism can best be understood as an ideology declaring an important role for professions and professionals in organizing and delivering certain goods and services in society. The word professional provides some insights into this ideology. To profess, from the Latin pro-fatr, means to speak forth or "to declare aloud or publicly."3 A profession, then, is a group of individuals speaking out, together, to declare and make public the shared values and standards that govern their work. A professional is a member of this group and professional actions are those that are in conformance with the shared and declared standards and values of the group. These standards are usually articulated in such public documents as codes of ethics, which aim to create an explicit covenant of trust between professionals, their clients, and society.4/.../