How to develop an undergraduate medical professionalism curriculum: Experts’ perception and suggestion

Introduction: Medical professionalism as a main ability ofphysicians is very important just like its teaching and learning.This study investigated medical professionalism experts’perspectives and experiences about professionalism as a steptowards developing a medical professionalism curriculum.Methods: A qualitative approach was adopted for this study.The data were obtained from 10 semi-structured interviews withmedical professionalism experts with a variety of experiencesin Iran between June and September, 2016. All sessions wereaudio-recorded, transcribed and analyzed using inductivecontent analysis.Results: The participants expressed their experiences onprofessionalism and its features. The data analysis revealed twomain categories: 1) teaching and learning strategies includingthree categories of learning outcome, teaching and learning andevaluation of medical professionalism, 2) role of context with threesub-categories of rules and regulations to develop professionalism,strengthening the hidden curriculum and executive resources.Conclusions: To address the development of professionalism inmedical students, the main factors, i.e., teaching and learningstrategies and context with their categories and subcategoriesshould be considered and revised. To sum up, designing a formalmedical professionalism curriculum would be necessary and thenotion of professionalism must be integrated with all its phases.Employing effective learning and assessment methods by means ofqualified teachers and staff in a supportive learning environmentprovides students with valuable experiences and facilitates theprocess of teaching.