Measuring Medical Professionalism; Understanding Doctors' Performance

Measuring Medical Professionalism

Ed David Thomas Stern

Oxford University Press, £29.99/$49.50, pp 311 ISBN 0 19 517226 4

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Understanding Doctors' Performance

Eds Jim Cox, Jennifer King, Allen Hutchinson, Pauline McAvoy

Radcliffe, £27.95/$52, pp 184

ISBN 1 85775 766 1

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The past 20 years have seen a resurgence of interest among doctors in the concept and practice of “professionalism.” The Royal College of Physicians of London recently defined medical professionalism as “a set of values, behaviours, and relationships that underpins the public trust in doctors.” In his elegant introduction to Measuring Medical Professionalism, Jordan Cohen, president of the Association of American Medical Colleges, said that a physician imbued with professionalism offers patients by far the best chance of a good outcome in our increasingly sophisticated and risky healthcare system. For patients nothing can substitute for having a trustworthy doctor, “not laws, not regulations, not a patients' bill of rights, not watchdog federal agencies… nothing.”

So where did this new interest come from? After all, professionalism in medicine has deep historical roots. Until the 1980s it was the undisputed keystone of the regulatory bargain between the state and doctors in …