Physicians’ Attitudes and Conduct Task Force

The Educational Policy Committee (EPC) established the Task Force on Physicians’ Attitudes and Conduct to create a 'professionalism' curriculum in 1994.  This group of faculty and students spent two years investigating professionalism and ethics issues as they are currently presented in the curriculum and making recommendations for increasing the contact students have with these issues. 

The Task Force developed three initiatives and provided them to the EPC for implementation:

• an Honor Code for medical students and faculty,

• a process for a Student Advisory Committee, and

• a Curriculum Streamer

The Honor Code defines some explicit expectations and ideals for student performance.  The EPC implemented the Honor Code for all students and forwarded it to the SIUSOM Faculty Council for implementation at the faculty level.

The Student Advisory Committee (SAC) encourages peer-to-peer review and works in lockstep with the Student Progress System. 

The curriculum spans all four years and was intentionally designed to coordinate with events in the remainder of the curriculum and to be affectivity-based.  The major points stressed in the curriculum are:

1. Professionalism and ethics topics should be presented in an affective manner (small group discussion, case-based presentation and discussion, guest presenters, standardized patients, simulations, etc.).

2. Professionalism and ethics should be assessed regularly using self, peer, faculty, and, where applicable, patient evaluations.

3. Redundancy of the issues in the four-year curriculum is built into the curriculum proposal, allowing an opportunity for faculty to re-focus the issues as their environment changes. 

4. The clerkship sessions Medical Humanities provides in most of the clerkships are a valuable forum for students to discuss issues and concerns.

5. All content issues listed are critical; the important and nice-to-know issues are available for review by faculty and curriculum committees, but were omitted from the report to keep the recommendations workable.

6. The curriculum should be presented in an atmosphere of inquiry so that students feel free to fully explore issues and not be hampered in bringing up topics for discussion.

The EPC approved the recommendations at its April 1997 meeting and forwarded them to the Curriculum Committees with a charge to develop implementation plans by July 1997.  Preliminary plans were received from the committees and several initiatives were implemented for academic year 1997-1998. 

Oversight of the curriculum was assigned to Dr. David Resch, who chaired the Task Force, and PAC status reports became part of the EPC Agenda until the PAC Curriculum was incorporated into the design of the Doctoring Streamer.  At that point, responsibility for oversight of the PAC Curriculum was written into the Doctoring Director’s job description.