Professionalism in healthcare Essays

Professionalism in healthcare Essays Professionalism in healthcare Essay Professionalism in healthcare Essay The term professionalism as applied in health profession is normally multifaceted and can thus be divided in to three classes; professional parameters, professional behaviors, and professional responsibilities. Professional parameters are those that include legal and ethical issues. Professional behaviors are those that relate to discipline as concern knowledge and skills, appropriate relationships with clients and colleagues as well as desirable appearance and attitudes. Professional responsibilities on the other hand concerns responsibility to the profession as well as to the practitioner, clients, employers and the society. Over the past years the issue of professionalism has been a major concern within the healthcare sector (medical). The professionalism or lack thereof as exhibited by many medical practitioners as includes radiologists and other related concern have been witnessed in the wider scope of the health profession Effective health care service delivery is largely dependent on high degrees of skill in professionalism. The professionalism skills are essential to all practitioners who believe and subscribe to vision of a successful radiology profession. Any health care professions like radiology that exhibits high level of excellence in the provision of health care research and education are promoting professionalism. With reference to past research a great number of issues as concerns quality and safety in radiology have been identified (Lane, F. Donnelly Janet, L. Stife. 2006). ). Errors that involve medication, wrong site procedures, mistakenly identifying patient’s procedural complications among other complications all relate to the radiology field in health care to varied extents. Arguments suggesting that systems issues are essential to obtaining better quality and safety is equally very valid to radiology as it is to other health care services. Particular cases such as lost or inaccessible images and reports, delayed communication of patients’ results as well as inadequate information about patients are known issues in radiology that have been addressed through the implementation of both hospital and radiology information systems. This has in effect minimized the operational costs while at the same time the level of quality and service has greatly improved. Through such institutions as ACR, which has taken a leading role in nurturing programs that seek to address various issues that are unique to radiology. These issues include but are not limited to practice guidelines, level of technical standards appropriateness of criteria to use in examination imaging and programs accreditation. Even though it is often not easy to measure the skills subjective attitudes that amounts to excellent professionalism skills in any field of heath sciences like radiology, and as such come up with an outstanding radiologist, in my opinion there is a great sense of professionalism within the health sciences as applies to radiology. This is due to the development of various programs that have stressed on the significance of the professionalism skills. These programs have to an extent created measures that motivate positive radiologists’ behaviour. Such tools like the 360- degree feed back have also helped to establish the level of professionalism in health sciences that is very appreciable. However like in every discipline where participants have for long been termed as â€Å"professionals† there still exists such perceived problems of sub optional professional behaviour as well as communication. This is due to the fact that initially topics that relate to interpersonal skills as well as professionalism were not so much stressed in medical education. The dedication toward the training and sensitizing in professionalism and its significance has been largely lacking. In spite of these, the various programs developed I do believe would help to better the level of professional in the various sectors of health sciences.