Doctors are a critical component of the healthcare system. A new report from the Royal College of Physicians, Doctors in Society: Medical professionalism in a changing world suggests instilling, supporting and evaluating medical professionalism throughout a doctor’s career. Recommendations include:

• Strengthening leadership and managerial skills
• Developing clinical leaders
• Creating a national voice for medicine
• Better interprofessional education and training
• Identifying potential medical students with developed, or the potential to develop, the qualities of medical professionalism
• Education, training and evaluation of medical professionalism throughout a doctor’s career
• Managing medical careers more effectively, particularly through the use of mentorship to transmit professional values

Baroness Julia Cumberlege, Chair of the working party, said:

Deference is dead. In the modern world patients want a more equal relationship with their doctor. The internet supplies a wealth of information, not always accurate; science provides new technologies, sometimes potentially dangerous; management monitors and expects results in productivity, on occasions engendering unavoidable conflict.

By strengthening and developing medical professionalism doctors can respond to a myriad of pressures and meet new challenges which emerge, while maintaining the trust the public has in the profession.

Slightly pessimistic of the baroness, but not too far off the mark. Patient empowerment is changing the way caregivers and patients interact with one another, hopefully for the better.