INTRODUCTION

Defining and understanding professionalism in medicine is a challenging undertaking. Translating that definition and understanding into the complex world of medical education is even more challenging. My goal in this chapter is to describe how these challenges are addressed in the setting of a traditional, or organ-based, medical school curriculum at the University of Washington School of Medicine (UWSOM).

Well into the UWSOM faculty's work on introducing medical professionalism into the curriculum, we became aware of the debate among medical education experts working in the field of professionalism between those who emphasize a didactic approach focusing on definitions and a specific knowledge base and those who emphasize narrative and experiential learning. Interestingly, through our work in developing and implementing a curriculum on professionalism, we have found it necessary to intertwine these two approaches as we attempt to create a successful curriculum. The theoretical debates between the two schools of thought both helped us to understand what we were already doing and to become more deliberate as we moved the professionalism curriculum forward. A merging of these two threads appears to be consistent with the direction this debate is taking for others as well.

Another interesting aspect of the complex undertaking involved in teaching medical professionalism became apparent in the course of our work. We learned that it is important to focus on an “aspirational” approach to professionalism in teaching this material.