Teaching Professionalism and Ethics Among Undergraduate Students – A Tertiary Hospital Base Study

Background: Medical ethics has progressively turned into a common element of the undergraduate curriculum at many medical institutes, often within a well-dened humanity programme. Professionalism is a concept of belief system to achieve trust between physicians and society. Professional competencies the habitual and judicious use of communication, knowledge, technical skills, clinical reasoning, emotions, values and reection in daily practice for the benet of the individual and community being served. It is important to gather baseline information on professionalism awareness among undergraduate medical students to be able to guide curriculum along with its teaching and assessment methologies. Ethics teaching has been shown to have signicant inuence on professionalism and moral qualities of medical professionals. Aneed is felt to train undergraduate students and nd out perceptions of undergraduate medical students regarding ethics and professionalism. The study aims to explore the perceptions of medical undergraduate students and the assess their attitude on professionalism and ethics. Materials and Methods: It was a qualitative study in which four focus group discussions where conducted among rst phase, second phase and third phase MBBS. Manual content analysis of the transcripts were done. Results: The text information was categorised into 29 categories which were merged into seven major themes, after the qualitative analysis of the data, namely qualities of a good doctor, need of teaching professionalism, ways of teaching professionalism to under-graduate medical students, assessment of professionalism, factors promoting professionalism, and factors hindering professionalism. The students perceived that a good doctor should have adequate knowledge of the subject and should keep the subject update. A good doctor should be committed to accountable to patients, profession and community, seless, healthy, good communicator, ethical and law abiding, practice integrity and social justice. This study conrmed the need of teaching professionalism and ethics to identify trained the students by role modelling, group discussion. Physician are likely to improve the professionalism with training and experience. Conclusion – professionalism is an important component of medicines contract with society. Medical under-graduate students should be trained about the need and professionalism through narratives, role modeling by faculties, case scenarios and small-group discussions. Summary:A supportive and conductive environment for enhancing adoption of good professional practice skills should be created both at the academic institutions and the clinical training sites within the health system. The study has assess the undergraduate students perception, keeping in mind the difference in attitude of professionalism among the students at different phases of the MBBS course.